Purple Floral Dining Room

 Welcome back!

Continuing with our adventure, we've fallen into a routine at this point.  We are living with the Beery's on the farm.  Every morning Brett is the first to get up to begin the chores of farm work.  The cows need to be fed and the fire wood needs to be split and stacked into the wood box (which actually opens from both sides so it can be loaded from outside and then accessed by the inside next to the wood stove, clever!)  I'm up next stumbling to the coffee maker. We eventually are all gathered in the kitchen going over our plan for the day.  We load up anything we need from the farm and head into town and over to the house.  We work all day...well maybe until 4ish, and then head to the grocery store to pick up supplies for dinner and back to the farm for a big family meal.  Everything is running smoothly until...the storm hits.  

This storm reminded us of a good Montana winter storm.  It was very cold and windy, causing drifts to form over the roads.  Brad and I were determined to make it into town to work on the house because we'd gotten word that our moving truck would be arriving soon.  They closed the schools so we told Chelsea and Brett to stay home and Brad and I ventured out.  We reached areas of the road that had such huge drifts that our SUV couldn't have made it through so we turned around and headed a different direction.  Well we eventually made it although looking back it wasn't a very wise move!  So as the day progressed the storm continued and conditions worsened.  We were going to have to stay at the house.  As you may recall from an earlier blog, we had nothing but a couple of camp chairs in our new house.  Luckily our vehicles had been delivered a few days earlier and Brad remembered that we always carry a couple of blankets in the back of cars for emergency.  He went to the garage and rummaged through all cars finding what he could so we could make up a place to sleep.  We ended up sitting in our dining room on our camp chairs streaming news from  his laptop using the phone hot spot! 

Potato chips for dinner and we made up a makeshift bed in the office area and spent our first (memorable) night at the house!

Ok, lets focus on the dining room.  OMG can you imagine all the wall paper!  The house has very high ceilings so this was quite the project.  I will show you the listing photos first, as before:

So we began the peeling of the wallpaper. The purple on the lower half was also wallpaper and there was even a lovely border!

So when you peel wallpaper it leaves behind the backing which is glued to the walls.  We used a spray-on product the softens the glue so you have a fighting chance.  Although even when you get the paper off there is the scrubbing of the walls to remove the glue residue.  Not easy!

All of our hard work begins to pay off as we finally get some primer up.

We are also painting out the trim which includes the built-in hutch and window casings.

We picked a couple of neutral colors to use and we feel like it is so much better.  Final results below:

You may notice the light fixture from the living room was moved into the dining room.  When we removed the crystals to clean it up, I liked the basic brass of the fixture so well without the crystals so that's how we left it.

 

Here's a side by side for reference.