Grandma's Plates

Since we moved into this house, I have been searching for some beautiful artwork for our dining room. This is really the only room in the house that has a lot of wall space. All of the other rooms are full of windows and doors and chimneys so decorating them didn't require a lot of thought. The beautiful artwork had to fulfill a couple of requirements. It had to take up a lot of horizontal space, and it had to be relatively cheap. We are not in the 'art collector' phase of our lives yet.



Grandma to the rescue! My Grandmother, Shirley D, painted these plates when I was a kid. They've hung in her house for as long as I can remember and I have always loved them, so I was very happy to be the lucky recipient when my grandparents moved to a smaller home recently.



This isn't a great photo, but if you click on it you can see them in more detail. They fulfill all of my requirements, AND they have sentimental value. Thanks Grandma!

Dining Room Redux... Part 2

When we first moved in, the dining room was painted Ruskin Room Green, and it's a nice color, but under the light of that room it turned into this yellowy, limey color and I didn't like it. So, I painted it red. Rembrandt Ruby. This has always worked for me in the past, red always works for me. We left the frieze alone because we planned to paper it and the ceiling. The problem with the red was that it made the woodwork and the furniture disappear.


When we bought this giant china cabinet, we didn't want it to blend in with the walls or make the room even darker. I am the first one to say that I like dark spaces, but this wasn't quite right, so we painted it again. This time Chris chose the palette and I think it worked out great. Oddly enough, we used the original room color above the plate rail, so we have kind of come full circle. With the new wall colors, the Ruskin Room Green is a much different color. The yellowy tone now looks golden and lovely. The walls and ceiling are also from the Sherwin Williams historical color palette, the walls are Buckram Binding and the ceiling is Indian White.

Chris installed the new chandelier last autumn while I was visiting my brother. A very nice surprise.


I am hoping one day to build a built-in china cabinet for this space, but that could be many years away. In the interim we still need storage, and it so happens that the makers of this fine quartersawn china and buffet are shutting down their furniture division, so we got it for a song. I am so happy to have a place for everything, now we can get started on the kitchen...

The Before Pics

This is the condition of the house before we moved in. I'll try to post the photos as if you were taking a tour of the house. This is the 'Solarium' looking toward the front door:

These are the windows on the outer wall of the solarium:


Looking toward the dining room from the solarium:


The living room from the solarium:

The living room looking toward the stairs:


The living room from the stairs:


The fireplace, exactly as pictured in the Sears catalog:


The kitchen. The green walls are 20 year old wallpaper. I liked the color and even the pattern of the paper, but it was in bad shape.

The door to the right of the counter is the world's very smallest powder room. I don't have any photos right now, but I'm sure we'll get some eventually. It's so small, that when I threw a baby shower last year, the pregnant woman couldn't use it.

This is the problem wall in the kitchen. The refrigerator door won't open all the way unless it is slightly turned in toward the kitchen and there is no range hood. Also, in order to walk from the stove to the sink, you have to circumnavigate the island which seems OK until you're carrying a big pot of pasta with wet hot pads and your fingers are burning...

The dining room:

The bathroom is in surprisingly good shape. The fixtures could be refinished at some point and that weird tile that was installed to put in a shower could be replaced with more subway tiles, but neither of those things really bother me. Even the window in the shower (not pictured) is in good shape. It's really amazing how well the previous occupants of the house took care of it.