The Dining room awkward middle stage...

Much like people and their awkward adolescence years, most of our rooms had some sort of unfortunate looking middle stage too. We knew that getting rid of the before was a must but all those amazing after ideas were out of budget. Enter the awkward stage for us, where I had never decorated anything bigger than half a dorm room and we had about 5 cents to use for an entire house worth of space that needed fixing.

I hope that we aren't the only people to have ever attempted a room face lift only to reflect back on the work done and say "oh man. this looks horrible. but oh well." If we are indeed the only people who've done the fugly middle improvements then let the following pictures serve as a terrible warning about how things can go so very wrong.

The worst offender is easily the Salmon colored paint. We hated it from the beginning, but there were other more pressing matters for Pete to spend his time and money on. Plus I was uber lazy during this renovation phase with my bedroom painting disaster as a fresh memory, so I certainly wasn't going to be re-painting by myself (oh the horror!).

In conjunction with our best left dead in the 1990's salmon paint there was our dark pine china hutch and dry sink. Bought at a thrift store for cheap we used it as the lacking dining room storage and for displaying my heirloom china. There were grand plans to refinish the dark pine to a much more pleasing color but again, I'm lazy and those plans didn't quite happen.

Now that the years have gone by and I've ramped up my interest and participation with our house I'm certainly better equipped to handle any awkward midvations that will spring up in the future.

My style is (slightly) more clear and I have a much better idea now about how to envision something as a whole of a room within the house. Working within a tight budget will almost always be likely with me, but I've learned how to get what I want out of something cheap instead of just settling for "it will do".

I shudder to look back at how I handled our house during those early years. At the same time that is exactly what this house has been to me most of all, one giant four bedroom learning experience.