Dining turned living room after!

Turning the old formal dining room into a living room was a no brainer for us. As was pulling out the old off center fake mantel. Like most rooms in the house we fixed everything up in stages and with a plethora of generous hand me down items.

The old chandelier was taken down and flush mounted low profile light was added. These ceilings are low so anything that dangled down was a poor choice... really really low ceilings. People in the 1850's were short.

Pete ripped off the old paneling from the fireplace one afternoon while I was working. This was a project I just didn't have the vision for at the time and he had to convince me it was a good idea. Of course I now love it! I'm so happy that I was proved wrong and Pete could see how exposing the orginal brick would look good.

There was no awesome old fireplace hiding behind the panaling, just a few plastered up wood burning stove holes. The easiest way to fix that was to get a plug-in fireplace surround. The "flames" are hillarious.

The fastest way to fix gross floors? Carpet. After tearing up all the various layers of flooring we had carpet installed until the time came to figure out better options. For a few years it was the perfect solution. Merry Christmas 2004 to us.

Three years later and the carpet was starting to look a little sad in the main rooms. I guess constant house construction in and out of the front door combined with an old dog makes for hard wear and tear. My adversion to vaccumming was probablly a contributing factor, so out came the living room carpet!

Unfortunately the orginal floors were in no shape for restoring. Shopping around we found a killer deal on 4" hand scraped oak hardwoods. They were clearing out the stock for about $2 sq/ft. Installation was done by Pete and his floor nailer.

See the ferns in the white planters? Yeah, they turned brown and died on me. Somehow I killed them.