A Blinding Difference!

Yesterday you saw the humble beginning of our recent house’s dining room.  We really didn’t make any major changes in this space, but it is amazing how the little touch ups made such a huge difference.  We left off with the space looking like this:

Okay, well, the space is fine, but I feel like there was no warmth in the space.  I’ve bemoaned the horrible tile, for well ever, but it wasn’t changing.  In fact, in the kitchen remodel I told you how I took a few steps to make the tile and basically the whole color orange look better in the space.  One of them was adding a little bit of orange to the living room (read more about picking colors for your home!). 

To return the favor to the living room, I decided to bring a little bit of the color from the living room into the dining room.  I did that in a few ways.  First, blue color, from the drapes, dishes and back of the hutch is everywhere in our house.  Since blue is the complimentary color to orange this helped a TON!   But what I am talking about right now is adding new bamboo shades to layer update the look of the windows.

Adding the drapes was a HUGE improvement,  it was so sterile before.

I would have loved to make a fun patterned fabric into a roman shade (even if it didn’t function like these, because we had functioning blinds and drapes.  Because time was an issue AND I wanted to add natural texture and warmth I ran over to my local Home Depot (it used to be a 30 second drive literally, sob, I miss the closeness, it was like hanging out at a friends house for us- walking into the Home Depot, sob) and bought some great in stock bamboo shades (they don’t have them in stock in my local store now, so just check what they have at your store….).  They were the same color and the flooring in the living room too!  Score!

The living room flooring looks like this

We just followed the instructions in the package for hanging the drapes.  And when ever you hang drapes please be aware of the safety hazard of the strings for children and pets, I know how scary they can be!… be sure to install the little wrapping do-hickeys… or at least two nails, about 4 inches apart so you can wrap the strings around the nails.

We hung the bamboo  shades level with the drapery bar about 7 inches above the window so they would stack on the wall and you couldn’t see a gap between the bar and shades!  I love the way it turned out!

A few small fixes and we will be done!  I will show you it all tomorrow!