Dining room update

Since I posted about my dining room, I decided to refinish the china cabinet.

This is what it looked like before....

My mom gave me this when we moved into this house, it is filled with her first china set she bought when she was 17. 

Here is the finished result! 

The china set is white with gold leaves, in the glass on the doors, it has gold etching, it all goes so nice together.

And then I tripped over the dog, put my hands out to steady my fall and put my right arm through the glass on one of the doors, smashing the glass...I am lucky that I didn't need stitches, but now I am upset because of the ruined glass.... I can easily have another glass piece cut, but not so easily the gold on the glass....I am thinking I will replace booth piece with just plain glass....that's the simplest thing to do....my poor dog, She is a black lab mix and she likes to lay right by where ever I am....I am always tripping over her, but have never fallen before.....she feels so bad.

How I updated ugly red brick in my dining room

Hi there! 

Today, I am going to share a little about our dining room. I have never had my own dining room before...lol. 

In every other place we have lived we never had one, so this being our first house we ever bought, I was so overjoyed that it had a dining room! And not only did it have a dining room but that dining room had a real fireplace!! 

But this is what the fireplace in the dining room looked like.....

When we moved in I added the 100 yr old mantle (that came out of my fathers grandparents house)

and dressed it up best I could......

But that red brick just stood out like a sore thumb!

And now I will show you every angle of the dining room....lol and look there is the kitchen too!!

I never want to actually use this fireplace with a fire because of the mess and soot it makes, but i got this candle holder at a yard sale and its perfect for this fireplace!

So after looking for ways to get rid of the red brick, but I didn't want to just paint over it, I moved everything to one side of the room and got started...

I mixed white semi-gloss paint half with equal amounts of water, as a white wash...the 3 coats turned out like this

then 2 more coats tuned out like this.....

Put it all back together and I HATED it!!!

It looked worse than the red brick! I almost cried.....almost.

The look I was going for was more like this (a photo i found on Pinterest)

beautiful, clean, almost creamy white.....

So back to work I went, this time I added 3 parts paint to 1 part water

The first coat was already so much better!!

This is me, not crying that I ruined my dining room lol

It was finally coming along correctly!

Now that I was on the right path for the brick, in between while the brick dried I tackled the mantle, I went with a red, because, of the fabric on my dining room chairs, I hadn't found the right material to recover them yet, so I had to pick a color out of the existing fabric to match, so red it was!

I also painted the inside of the fireplace and the red tile on the floor black.

I put everything back together again, but this time I was unhappy with the decor....it was lacking something

Here is where I show you all angles of my dining room again!! and OH look the kitchen again.....lol 

If you can see from this photo I changed out the decor for more beachy stuff and I really love it! 

And notice the chairs.....

.I just decided I wasn't going to reupholster these chairs, instead I wanted to replace them with all wooden chairs, so my search started on local used furniture sites and I got 7 chairs for $40!! 

5 matching ones came form one person for $30 then 2 more I found at a yard sale for $5 each.....its a good thing I did because the day before I was going to pick up the chairs this happened...

I love the new chairs so much! It makes the dining room look so much spacious! 

I cant wait to makeover the chairs and the table! 

I have big plans for them!