Since my last post, John and I have made some more progress on our dining room makeover. Unfortunately, we’re not as far along as I had hoped we would be. Although this is a fairly simple project, the weather in New Jersey has been awful. We had snow on the ground for most of February. John and I decided to hold off on cutting the wood until the weather improved. The good news is that most of the snow has melted, and we’re gearing up to start working again.
When we last left off, I had sanded down the wallpaper seams, spackled, and primed the walls. I was very proud of my hard work. The walls looked soooo much smoother. I used a shellac based primer to seal all the wallpaper seams (as seen the following photo).
We started the actual painting process by determining the height of our board and batten. Using painters tape, we tried several different height options in the room. We originally wanted to go with a height of 48 inches, but that fell right in line with our light switches. Next we decided to go lower, with a height of 36 inches. Unfortunately, that height did not look right with placement of our windows. We ultimately decided to go higher and settled on a height of 60 inches. It looks great with our windows and goes above all the light switches.
John marked a line at 60 inches around the perimeter of the room. I started painting the lower half of the room white. This was a lot more challenging than I anticipated. Even with primer, I had to apply 3 coats of paint to cover the old blue wall color.
After the white paint was complete, I taped off the bottom of the wall using tape and plastic. I found this awesome tape and plastic combo at Home Depot. I highly recommend it. It was easy to use and did a great job protecting the lower portion of the walls from paint spatter.
I painted the top of the walls in Benjamin Moore’s Garden Oasis. The color is so relaxing and calm. It is the perfect transition color between our living room and kitchen.
Last weekend, John hung the top rail for the board and batten (I already love it!). Next up, we are going to install the vertical battens. We are excited to get moving with the dining room makeover again. I can’t wait to show you the finished project!