Apologies for all the dining room posts lately but well, this is basically consuming my every thought at the moment aside from client work and so I figured I’d share what we got up to this past weekend! As much as I’d love to show you beautiful pictures every single week, I think if you are planning a remodel and you are doing the work yourself, you have to be prepared for the work to drag on a bit and have lots of ‘un-pretty’ in between! I guess it’s really just about knocking each little thing off the list until the room is done and it’s just never fast enough for my liking ;) I’m gonna guess it’s the same for you!

Planning the moulding in the dining room - www.swoonworthy.org

Anyway, as I mentioned last week, we’d installed all the dado rails and architraves but the skirting board needed to be fit and everything needed to be filled (caulked for my American brethren). I had visions of completing all that on Saturday and spending Sunday painting the doors and skirting board but yeah, that vision so didn’t happen. It took Wayne a good portion of Saturday to just get the skirting boards nailed on and then he started the filling process which ended up going into Sunday as well. As I couldn’t paint until the fill is totally dry, there was no painting on Sunday. Booooo.

Instead, I decided to start mapping out where I wanted all the decorative panel mouldings to go and so while Wayne worked on the filling, I had my measuring tape, spirit level and about 4 different straight-edges as well as the laser level, pencil and masking tape to map out the whole room. From where we masked off, we could measure everything up and figure out how much of the paneling we’d need to order in. OH AND THERE WAS MATH INVOLVED. And of course, there are no straight walls in our house which made doing this even more… erm… interesting.

Planning the moulding in the dining room - www.swoonworthy.org

This took me HOURS. I was never particularly great with math – I’m a visual person really and thus the need to even do this at all to see what it will look like, but I soldiered through. I worked all day Saturday and Sunday to get this right but I’m pretty happy with it now and even just in masking tape, I really think it’s going to look rather grand! Me and my fancy pants dining room – eek!

Planning the moulding in the dining room - www.swoonworthy.org

Excuse the old duvet slung over the TV in here! Ha! #keepinitreal Also, you can see where I painted over the paint swatches I was considering if you were wondering what those splotches on the wall were.

Planning the moulding in the dining room - www.swoonworthy.org

Our messy makeshift ‘dining area’. Notice that Wayne is always happiest when he’s cooking and there’s DIY happening. Is it any wonder why we’re together?

In other news, I finally decided on a paint colour – whoop!

First an interesting observation: I had a paint card for Farrow & Ball’s Cornforth White and already had some leftover paint of Dulux’s Dusted Moss 2 from the living room. When I painted a tester on my walls of the Dusted Moss, I realised that – at least in my dining room – it’s a DEAD RINGER for Cornforth White!Β So if you are looking for a cheaper alternative to F&B’s Cornforth White, well, Dulux Dusted Moss 2 is it. Crazy that those were initially the two colours I’d considered for the dining room and they ended up being nearly the same freaking shade.

Anyway, neither of those were the colour I chose. I also got samples of Farrow & Ball Blackened, Dimpse and their new colour Dropcloth. As soon as I opened the tin for Dropcloth, I knew it would read way too beige for what I wanted in here so dismissed that immediately. But Dimpse and Blackened were both rather lovely.

Comparing Blackened Dimpse and Dusted Moss 2

I blue-tacked my main art print and the wallpaper sample to compare against!

I will admit, as soon as I opened the Blackened tin, I knew I’d found my colour (I always seem to know when the paint colour is right nearly immediately so either I have a gift for choosing colour or I am VERY lucky – probably the latter) but of course, I wanted to get them all up on a few different walls in the room and compare.

The Dusted Moss read a bit too mushroom in the south-western light in my dining room. In my north-east facing living room, the colour looks cooler and softer but it went very muddy in the light and I knew it wasn’t quite what I wanted for in here. Dimpse was like a lighter version of this but still had quite a brown-y undertone.

Blackened, however, GLOWED. It was just such a beautiful shade – clean and clear with a bit of a red undertone without it overpowering or going too warm. I know it’s a bit hard to tell from that picture above but here’s a pretty good representation (at least on my screen!) of the colour. The one on F&B’s site didn’t really look the same as what it looked like on my own wall.

Blackened by Farrow and Ball

Blackened by Farrow and Ball – photo by Eleanor Busing for Apartment Therapy

I paid attention to each shade on the walls throughout the day and through various weather (it’s gone from sunny and bright to SNOWING to dark and miserable rain and back to full sun in the last week – welcome to England) and in every circumstance, I still loved Blackened. Happily, when I asked Wayne to choose his favourite (I’d not told him mine at that point), he also chose Blackened. So that’s decided then! Blackened it is.

Hopefully, if I have the time this week, I’m going to try to get the gloss painting done on the doors and skirting boards and install my pretty new brass handles! They are from M MarcusΒ Heritage BrassΒ collection and they are just stunning.

door pulls

Hopefully I can share that with you soon so stay tuned. There’s so much more to come!

In the meantime, I realise the progress seems glacial but what do you think of the colour choice? The hardware? Where ultimately the moulding will end up? Are you as excited as I am to see this room finally taking shape? Okay, probably not but STILL. Can I have a fast forward button on this project please?

 

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