First I want to start by saying THANK YOU all so much for all of the wonderful comments on part one of my dining room reveal! You gals have truly made me feel embraced by the blogger world!
Okay on to the second part of the big reveal!
The above picture shows the entrance into the living room from the dining room. That was one solid wall when we bought the house. At one point our big old farmhouse had been converted into two residencies, we had to make it into one house again for our mortgage to go through,which was our plan anyways. My Dad and husband had to connect the two residencies, but we didn't even own the place yet. I thought long and hard about what would make sense and flow design wise. I am glad to this day that I choose this wall for the passageway. I love the way the rooms lead into each other, I am on the search for salvaged french doors to put there.
The original passageway which had been closed up, is in the room behind the closed door below, which is now our guest bedroom. Most of the walls in our house were in good shape when we removed all of the paneling but the one seen below was in awful shape. I had to drywall it and then skimcoat over that. I am not a fan of drywall but sometimes it is your only option when renovating. To make it match the original plaster and lathe walls I always do a very heavy skimcoat with light weight plaster. I had no idea what I was doing when I first started but I learned as I went. I am all for diving into something. It all comes down to the sanding, lots and lots of sanding. Its so messy but so worth it.
As you can see I am not quite ready to give up on the greenery from Christmas. Our winters here are very "white" and I just love that little bit of color that natural things like garland and little pine trees bring to the room.
My mom gave me the cupboard pictured below, she had to get something bigger to hold my Dads very large collection of books. It is from an old shop and my mom snagged it for a song. I love it and was so excited when she passed it onto me, and it is just the right size for some of my ironstone collection.
I wallpapered the back of it with some French toile that my mom had leftover from a bathroom. It is very subtle and adds the perfect backdrop to the white ironstone. It wouldn't stick however, so my sister told me to try mixing flour and water. Worked like a charm!
Below is a printers box that hold things I bought at flea markets as a little girl. My mom started taking me to flea markets at a very young age, and I loved them from the start!
And to answer some questions about the pillows on my couch...
The smaller ticking pillows on the ends are actually vintage Italian military pillow cases that I just folded over. I bought the cases from Spring Hill Farm on Etsy, it is a wonderful shop.
And the larger striped pillow is from Big Lots! I just found it the other day, they had red too! I was so excited I wanted to walk around and say to people "Look they have grain sack inspired pillows, for $15"!
A big thank you to Melanie from Rusticfarmhouse.blogspot.com and Linsey from Farmhouseporch.blogspot.com for featuring me on their Facebook pages!
