Tag: Dining Room

Uncategorized

Oli in the Dining Room

Christine

Someone pointed out that Oliver was not in any of the Dining Room after pictures. So here he is, under the dining table.
You see, Oli doesn’t hang out in the dining room too often, unless there is food involved, of course. He is usually very good, he doesn’t pest or beg, he simply makes himself available, should any food spontaneously jump off the table.

On a house-related note, I have been having trouble with the legs of this dining table. It belonged to my grandmother (like most of the furniture), and we had to disassemble it for a few years while it was stored at my mother’s house.

There are two of these legs, with three curved legs off the main trunk. The problem seems to be where the pieces meet, they are separating from the weight of the table. Now I know that one has been loose most of my life (I used to play under that table at grandma’s as a child: the way the legs fit together made good room divisions for Barbie’s house- I liked arranging the furniture best). The other five curved legs seem to have come loose recently, possibly from the change in temperature, humidity, etc. when it was moved from grandma’s to mom’s house.

I had Jack, my favourite wood restorer, look at it right before Christmas last year. He took it all apart, re-glued and reinforced the pegs. I let it set twice as long as Jack said I needed to, just to be on the safe side. Now, these joints seem to be getting loose again, making the whole table wobbly. Just in time for Christmas dinner.

Uncategorized

House Tour: Dining Room After

Christine

And now, today…
The walls are painted a very soft shade of spun pink. I wish the color was a bit more obvious, but I was afraid to go much darker. In a room this size that had the potential to be too much pink. I just wanted a blush of pink to set off the couple pieces of pink depression glass from my great-grandfather Norman.
I think I still need more stuff on the walls, but it comes slowly. Almost everything is a hand-me-down, mostly from my grandmother.
Now the dining room wall is returned to its original location, and that puts the whole room back in proportion. That makes me so happy.
Both sets of French doors have been stripped of their paint (one set still hanging on the wall they moved, was a dingy white, the other set found in the basement, had been painted half mint green, half liliac), and re-hung.
Now, two small radiators, evenly spaced, make for a much better look. Plus the large one used to be partly in the window bump-out, and I was just never comfortable with that. The floor does slope down there.

Uncategorized

House Tour: Dining Room Before

Christine

The Dining Room, as it looked in September 2003…

Really, no too bad. Bland wall color. Really poor treatment of that beautiful bank of windows. The glass shelves across the windows were really special, too. These people really had a thing for wall mounted shelves. They were all over the place. The plate rail around the top wasn’t bad, but it had to be removed when we moved the wall, and we discovered that it was definitely not original, and was very cheaply made. Also the chair rail was added at a later date.
It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong with this room. The proportions were wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. In the picture below, to the left of the French doors, you’ll notice a strange lumpy line running down the wall, right above the radiator. It is hard to tell from these pictures, but that is the edge of the bump out. You see, sometime in the past, probably in the 1950s or 60s, someone enclosed the back porch to make a bedroom. And they moved the dining room wall to make the bedroom slightly larger. Once I figured out what threw this room off, I knew it would bug me until I would be able to move it back to its original location. I just didn’t know it would be so soon…
Note the fabulous press-board entertainment unit the previous owners left for me, mostly because they couldn’t fit it on their moving van.

There are two radiators in this room. They should be about the same size, and they flank the window bump out. As some point, probably when they moved the wall, someone swapped the second small radiator from the dining room and put it in the living room. They took one that was almost twice as big and made it the second one in the dining room. I can only assume this was done to provide extra heat to this tiny, make-shift bedroom. Even now, it is cold back there, and before we rearranged walls there was no heat source in that space, which is also over an un-insulated part of the basement. Burr.

The doorway to the kitchen was also no longer in its original location. It should have been about 32″ wide with a swinging door. The door is still here, and it is in beautiful condition. I was very lucky. Many of the original doors were still tucked here and there around the house. Also, don’t you just love the 60s-70s “chandelier”? Brass AND wood.
Although I like the plate rail, we never put it back up after we moved the wall. We would have had to replicate the brackets (which I have hung on to), and by the time we were even at the stage to even think about it, almost all of the shelf board had been re-purposed.

For such a simple room, it really looks different today.