Living Room and Dining Room Update!

Hello sweet friends! HAPPY SUMMER! :D

I hope you're having a lovely start to my absolute most favorite season ever. 

A (long) while ago, you may have caught our Living Room and Dining Room reveals. Well, friends, we've gone and updated everything so I wanted to share with you again. 

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Why did we change the living room? When we renovated it, all we really needed to do in the room was paint and remove those straight-from-the-80's mirrors over the fireplace. Everything else you saw was our newlywed, hand-me-down decor. Don't get me wrong-- we are SO grateful to all our friends and family who aided us in filling that room! And we really enjoyed it and felt very blessed. But it wasn't good for staging. Our goal with our fixer-upper is to sell it back; if the living room is the first impression potential buyers receive, it needs to be a little more... Well... Matching. Thus, a few months ago we snagged up our tax refund and went bargain hunting. We updated the gallery wall, bought two chairs, curtains, a new (reclining!) sofa, and a cabinet that I refinished for our T.V. stand. Super bargain hunters that we are, this all rounded up under $600. I'm a proud living room mama. 

So why update the dining room? I knew that when we first moved in, beige and brown were slowly fading out as the go-to resell colors. Little did I know just how fast that fade would happen! Everything now is gray gray gray! I love gray a whole lot more, and it's a lot easier for me to work with personally, so off to the paint store I went.

You should also know, Dan's parents are the ones who originally painted the dining room. They came to visit when we moved in and worked on it while we were at work. It was such a lovely surprise! They've helped us so much with our house, somehow even while they live states away, and a part of me was a little sad to paint over their handiwork. I felt like I was painting over memories. But then I figured-- that's what houses do. They collect memories in layers of paint and plaster and drywall patches. And with each change, they grow. And a new memory is made. ♥

Picture time! I won't add too much commentary for this. :) Let me know what you think!

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I'm obsessed with these chairs. They're from Target! Prepare for many picture of these chairs...

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My college housemate Amy made this pillow for Dan and I when we got married. It has our names and wedding date embroidered on the back. Isn't it adorable? She's quite talented!

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Here's the cabinet that I refinished. I bought it at Habitat (what haven't I bought at Habitat?) for just $15! Sanded a little, primed a little, painted a lot and viola! I'm obsessed with it!

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My husband added the amazing lighting in the cabinet. I added my favorite young adult books. :) 

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Found this nifty little tub to keep our remotes in. Somehow we still lose them constantly...

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There are so many tutorials on Pinterest on how to make a gallery wall. I should write one on how NOT to do it using the pictures from the original living room post. #Oops? I like this one much better! 

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Here's a little table we keep all of our shoes in. (One of my biggest pet peeves is a bunch of shoes on the floor.) Another Habitat find. And! One of Dan's students painted that picture of us! She saw a picture on my (clearly not protected enough) Facebook and made this as a gift. IT'S GORGEOUS. People ask about it all the time and I love getting to share the story behind it. 

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Here's the original. Didn't she do a stunning job?

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And now, on to the dining room! :D

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As grateful as I am for our super cheap, Craig'slisted dining room table, I would love to get a black table for this room one day, but we'll probably move before that ever happens. I'll just imagine it. *Sigh* Pretty black table in my black and gray room...

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Oh, is that what it would look like? It DOES look marvelous!
.... Too much time on my hands? Sorry. I work at a school and I'm on summer break... 

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This picture I made. I took a picture that I bought at Goodwill, painted the frame, then used Mod Podge to glue pages torn from an old Bible all over it. The Bible quote is Ecclesiastes 3:11, of course. The top left starts with Genesis 1, the bottom right is Revelation 1, and they meet in the middle. 

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Here's another homemade wedding gift. Our sweet friend Caleb is an amazing artist and he made us a set of these dishes when we got married. Aren't they incredible? He offered to make us an entire set to use as our place setting, but internally I thought, I could never eat off of these. They'll scratch. Or break. I just want to look at them all day and think about how beautiful they are...

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And my last show-off for the post. This one is near and dear to my heart. It's my sand collection! I've gathered sand from every beach I've visited and many friends have brought me back jars of sand from beaches they've gone to and I've slowly gathered a large sample of one of my favorite things on earth. It's so cool to see how different the sand looks from different places around the world. Puerto Rico:  orange. Italy:  practically black.  Maine:  super rocky. Florida panhandle:  white and fine. I love it! If you ever want to send me sand, I won't protest!

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And that's our new living and dining room! I hope you enjoy and as always, I would love to hear your comments below. 

Come over sometime and visit. :) We'll cook you some scrumptious Southern food to eat in our dining room and then hunker down for coffee and dessert in my (favorite) paisley chairs. 

Happy summering, sweet readers!

Agape,
CC