Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself {Our New Old Dining Room}

This started as one long post but I decided to break it up into two because my rambling can be excessive, even for me...

So we have been jumping all over the house for the past few months.  No single room is what I would call "finished" but the Nursery is probably the closest.  And now I think the dining room is pretty damn close too!

I've briefly mentioned that we did a gut renovation on our kitchen, and removed the walls that separated the kitchen and dining room, kitchen and living room, and the dining room was already pretty open to the living room.  (Did you follow that? Me neither. Here is the file Tom created to give out to the different companies that gave us estimates for the work. Everything in the red zig zag is gone now).

Some before pictures from the MLS listing of the dining room/living room/kitchen:

So that wall to the right used to lead into the kitchen - we took it down (but we saved the accordion door and the chandelier!).  The double doors to the left head into the office/man cave.

Now from the other side, the wall to the left with the opening into the dining room is gone. There is a wall you don't see in this picture to the left of that kitchen table that we also removed (See it below). Essentially, our island is now where the kitchen table was. And this yellow kitchen is completely gone but that deserves its own post.

The living room:

And that wall to the right (which was the same wall in the kitchen) is now gone.  You can see the original opening into the dining area was already large, but now we've maximized that opening.  I would also like to note that clearly photographers for MLS listings use a wide angle lens.  These rooms are definitely roomy - but these photos make them look down right huge.

So now everything is super open and we have a solid 'great room' which we love and is oh so en trend.  But I still tend to look at these spaces separately when it comes to focusing on pieces to purchase to fill up this home. During demo we had them remove the dining room windows and put in french doors - eventually these will lead to a deck when we finally build one, but for now they serve as an nice way to get big furniture into the house. And they let in a lot of light.  We had them replace the old chandelier (which I saved for another project) and had them install this darling. Ohemgee I love this light.  We even learned how to put in our own dimmer switch after the electricians left. Let's just say because the instructions say you can put in 25 watt bulbs, doesn't mean you should, especially when there are 42 of them. Wattage literally accumulates. Did you know that? Now you do.

We purchased a new extendable table from West Elm, and the chairs are from our last dining set, whose remaining pieces have been sprinkled throughout the house.  They are a little beat up and not quite the same genre as all the MCM we've got going on in here but they are comfortable and I spent a lot of money on the upholstery back when I didn't have a ton of money to do that sort of thing and I cannot let them go. And because of GOLD, obvs.

And we temporarily placed our two old bookshelves from Target on this wall when we moved in and threw in some tchotchkes as place holders while I searched for the perfect hutch for this space. I only have this not so great picture of part of the bookcase, and you can see we saved the accordion door and used it for our holiday cards this year:

I'll take a break there, because the hunt for a great hutch is really what this post was originally about...

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