Home Improvement

 I am almost done wallpapering my dining room!! - so I thought I'd share.

 

Here is what the room looked like before (yes, with mysterious big pink spots).

Most of the wallpapers around today are super-contemporary-looking, but I was looking for something traditional, like toile. I also wanted horses on it.

🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎

The print I got is called Elway Hall. It was designed by Barry Dixon, who has a big farm in Virginia.

The print is named after his house.

                          Elway Hall (Photo: Matthew Benson/Traditional Home) and "Elway Hall"      

Doing the wallpaper was pretty tricky, but I liked it after a while; it was kind of relaxing.

Some advice if you want to try wallpaper yourself:

1. DO YOUR RESEARCH, because wallpaper is expensive. Get all the measurements right, and make a plumb line. (I messed up measurements at first, because I'm not great at math.) FYI, it's taken me about six rolls of wallpaper to cover the (13 x 11) room. 
2. BUT don't do too much research, because you'll get paralyzed and life is too short for that. Like, I made the mistake of watching videos like this. This guy is a professional and he still had tons of trouble trying to wallpaper behind a radiator. So you know an amateur like me has no chance. And as soon as people start using phrases like "remove the radiator," I'm, like, nope. Not happening.
3. Work off of two rolls (an "odd" and "even" one) to save paper, if you have a "drop match" pattern like I did.
4. You need room to roll the paper out.
5. Watch your pets or children. My cat was interested in the wallpaper strips and also the tape measure, I guess because it looks like a snake.
   
   I had to remind her that any one of those rolls cost more than she did, hehe. 

Besides the wallpaper, I also recently made some upgrades to the kitchen.

This is what it looked like when I bought the house:

This is what it looks like now:

I painted the walls white, changed out the cabinet pulls, added this Art Nouveau-y border and added a stove "backsplash."

                                                               Stove before & after

These were all inexpensive things that I think make the kitchen look much better. The backsplash is peel-&-stick tiles from Walmart. The cabinet pulls can be bought in bulk for a discount at Home Depot. The paint is Behr "Bakery Box." The border is also from Home Depot. 

That's all, folks!