Our House: Dining Room

      And the home tour continues.  Up today, the dining room.  This is actually the first room I did when we moved into our new house.  Our house was brand new when we moved in last May, which has so many perks.  Everything was nice and fresh.  However, it was a little boring to me, and John said that as long as I would do the painting, I could paint anything I wanted (within reason - which I do not always have).  So I pitched this idea for our dining room.  I wanted boxes of trim with glossy diamonds inside of them, and I would need his help with that.  After a lot of selling the idea on my part, he kindly said, "Yes," though, he did question my decision when we did the measuring and realized that it would entail 164 feet of trim.  I do love the way it came out, and I am so thankful for a husband that is willing to help make my hare-brained ideas a reality.


(photo courtesy of Main Street Real Estate)

We found this antique hutch on the cheap at a random store in Conway during the Toad Suck Festival a couple of years ago.  I have a slight love affair with miniature chairs and benches.  They keep showing up around my house.



One wall is covered in bird's nests that I got at a flea market in Texas.  I think I sort of have a love affair with nests as well.  The glossy diamonds show up well in these pictures.  Before we hung the trim, I taped off a diamond pattern in all of the boxes.  I painted over it all with glossy paint.  (Then I went a little nuts and mixed silver into the gloss and painted that over it - which John hated.  So I repainted the wall color over the diamonds and then repainted the gloss, which we both now love.  Some times I get carried away, and I am so glad that I have John as a balancing force.)  It gives the dining room a little pop and formality without it being overly poppy or formal.




I got some vinyl words (I do not remember where . . .) online to go over the hutch.  I flanked the window with topiaries on shelves, because I like a little symmetry in my rooms.  I originally wanted to put our china out on the hutch, but it ended up not fitting right, so we have been getting plates from each country we visit and putting those out for a little variety (mixed in with Aspen dessert plates from Pottery Barn).




For the curtains, I bought panels from Target and found a coordinating fabric to sew onto the bottom to make them floor-length.  I embellished them with beads from Hobby Lobby and really like the results.



So, that is my dining room.  Thanks for stopping by - maybe you can stop by for real sometime, and we can enjoy a meal together there.  That is the most fun.

Recipe for Poppyseed Bread: So Good I Can't Stop Eating It

      Well, John and I successfully ate up this poppyseed bread quite quickly.  It is that yummy.  It calls to you from the other room, beckoning you, wanting to be eaten.  I decided not to resist.  And I wanted to give you that opportunity as well.  Here's the recipe for Poppyseed Bread, which I got from my wonderful mother.



Here's what you need.



3 Cups flour
2 2/3 Cups sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 Cup milk
1 1/3 Cup oil
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tsp butter extract
1 1/2 tsp almond extract
1 1/2 Tbsp poppyseeds

Preheat oven to 350°.  Throw all the ingredients into a mixing bowl.



And mix it up.



For this round, I actually greased a bundt pan, but you can muffinize (not an actual word, but I thought it should be) this recipe or make it into little loaves.  So many uses for the amazing poppyseed bread.



Pour the batter into your greased pan.



Bake for 1 hour at 350°.  Check the bread, because depending on whether you are making muffins or loaves or a cake of sorts, the baking time will change.  Make sure a knife comes out clean.

And here is the icing on the cake.  Literally - here's what you need.



1/2 Cup sugar
1/4 Cup frozen orange juice concentrate
1/2 tsp vanilla (I know you are all jealous of my giant bottle of vanilla.  Send your husband to Mexico, that is where you can pick one up.)
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/2 tsp butter extract

Mix it up and pour over your hot bread.  Deliciousness.  ♥.
I usually make this bread around the holidays to give to neighbors, and then sometimes I want it in April.  Enjoy!

How to Paint a Plaid Wall

      Well, this little project took me about two months.  Not because it should take that long, but because I really was gone that much.  I think in a normal time frame, it would have taken me about 1 week working on it in between normal stuff.  That said, this project was a little time-consuming.  But I like the way it turned out, and I am excited to finish up the rest of the room.  Here's the finished product.



Plaid.♥.

For this project you need, a level, a pen, chalk, several different colors/sheens of paint, tons of tape and a fair amount of perseverance.  (I didn't think to take a picture of these items.)

I started off by deciding that I wanted my first stripes to be 12" wide.  So I measured and marked every twelve inches off on the bottom of the wall.



Then, I took great care to draw lines at 45° angles using the level.  This is where the level in your best friend (or worst enemy depending on how you are feeling about the project so far.)  This is where it is very important to get the lines straight and everything measured correctly, because the rest of the plaid is based off of these measurements and lines.



Since I figured out that there would be diamonds of the base color left after the blue stripes, I decided to go ahead and just tape off diamonds.  This saved me from having to tape stripes in one direction, let them dry, and then tape stripes in the other direction.  This was worth is because of how fat the stripes were.



Here is a critical step to clean paint lines.  Paint the base color over the edge of the tape.  My walls were lavender, so I repainted lavender over the tape lines.  This meant that any tape bleeding would be purple and would mean that once I painted blue over the tape, it would not bleed.  And it worked - beautifully.




After that, I actually painted over my pen lines since I knew the paint I was using was light enough that one coat would probably not cover it.  After that, I started using chalk.  It wipes off and doesn't affect the paint.  Then I painted the blue and took off the paint.



After that, I decided that I wanted alternating blue stripes to be covered with larger glossy stripes.  Unfortunately, this doesn't show up well in pictures, but it is a nice effect to add dimension to the wall.  I measured 3" into the diamonds and drew diamond between the ones that I was turning into stripes.  Then I taped it off and painted the gloss over it.



Then, I decided I wanted double stripes using the wall color from the rest of our house over each blue stripe.  I taped it off using three pieces of tape on each stripe.



After that, I decided to cross those stripes with alternating smaller cream color stripes using the trim color to go over every other section of purple.  I taped those off, painted them, and then went ahead and did the other brown stripes in the other direction.




The last thing I had to do was one more round of the cream colored stripes in that semi-gloss paint that again, adds dimension to the pattern.



And, just like that, you have a plaid wall.




I ♥ mine.

To see how the whole room turned out - click here!

Weekend: First Haircut, Anniversary and Booty Everywhere

     Well, this past weekend was quite a doozy.  Our restaurant is open for business again, which is a complete blessing.  Having to be closed for so long was such a nightmare, and it feels good to be serving chicken again to the masses.  However, after driving down Markham street today, I realize that we are so fortunate to only have had to deal with power loss.  So many others are dealing with much more.  A silver lining for me in this episode happened on Saturday.  In the midst of all the drama, our phone lines were also not working, which is so irritating.  So John had to forward the store phone to an extra cell line that we have for the store, which is attached to one of our old (about 4 years old) Razor phones.  Every time a customer called with a question or an order, the phone rang with the song "Booty, Booty, Booty, Booty, Booty Everywhere," which was a horrible song then and even more horrible now.  I have my younger sister to thank for sneaking that ring tone onto my phone way back when - it did make me laugh a lot in the midst of all the badness that had happened.
      Lily got her first haircut this weekend at Pigtails and Crewcuts, a shop that specializes in children's haircuts.  Since she has been a little touchy about life recently, we were not sure how it was going to go down.  However, all of our worries were in vain!  She did wonderfully, sitting in the police car sucking on her dumdum.  She would not remove her jacket, but that didn't really matter.  After the haircut, we rewarded her with a cupcake to be eaten in front of the fountain.  She was ecstatic, and so were we, at how well the whole experience went.  And her hair looks a little less mullety now.





(Bella watching, realizing it will be a long time until her first haircut.)


We went out for dinner for our anniversary later, with our little friends in tow.  (We are planning on really celebrating it in a couple of weeks with something a little more exciting.)  Since the weather was to die for, we ate outside at Buffalo Grill by the river and enjoyed cheesy fries, among other really healthy things.




Here's a shot of Lily helping me get ready to go.  It really is amazing to see how they try to imitate so early.



And, what I found in our laundry basket.



She loves to play with my shoes.  In other news, I finished the plaid wall!  I love the way it turned out and plan on sharing pictures very soon - possibly even tonight.  Stay tuned!