Extrreme Makeover Dining Room Edition

In my original post, I mentioned helping Stephanie with her dining room. We had been talking about what to do forever, but I never had time to get to El Paso and actually help her! So FINALLY, I had a three day weekend. I had already given Steph several ideas about what we could do. Little did I realize, that she LOVED one of the ideas!

This was Stephanie's dining room before.....
















When Steph and Joey moved into the house, ALL of the walls were dark colors, typical guy colors. Seeing as how they bought their home from a bachelor, this isn't surprising. Well, Steph had talked Joey into paining all the rooms but this one. Joey LOVED the green. Joey liked it so much that Kathy (Stephanie's mother) even told her that she should let the man have one room that he liked and she should leave it. Lucky for Steph, Joey is pretty agreeable, and he didn't care that we had a totally different plan.

Originally, we were going to cover the lower 36" of the wall with the aluminum punched tin ceiling tiles, put a chair rail in, and paint the upper portion of the walls red. For several weeks before my trip west, Stephanie and I were emailing each other and having entire conversations in nothing but links to shopping websites. She would send me a link to a chandelier, I would send her a link to an area rug, etc.

So the big weekend arrives. I got to El Paso just in time to get treated to my favorite restaurant ever.....PF Chang's.



The next morning, we headed to Lowes to purchase our supplies.....paint, molding for the chair rail, the punched tin, a chandalier....we had our list, and we were ready......UNTIL we saw that the ceiling tiles were $20 each, and we needed about 30 of them.

So we needed a plan B. I immediately thought of using the wall paper that looks like the design on the tiles, but is MUCH cheaper. Stephanie wasn't sold. We looked at every option possible, and nothing was going to satisfy her but the aluminum tiles. Finally, after pretty much getting rude and demanding it, we went to the wall paper. Luckily, on display, Lowes had some of the wall paper painted silver! She loved it! And instead of $600 we spent less than $40 and were able to cover the lower 36" of the walls for just about nothing!

I must interject here and say that Joey was a total lifesaver. There is NO WAY Steph and I could have done this ourselves. Well, I guess we could have, but it would not have looked as good as it does. We ended up doing a little bit more than we originally planned, like replacing all of the baseboards, too, but all in all, this extreme makeover dining room edition was a success!!!!!



The hutch you see in the back corner is Joey's special project.....Here is a close up.



What do you think? Leave me a comment!!!!!

Starting Up

My dear cousin is a huge blogger! She even wears a shirt that says "Don't make me mad or I will write about you on my blog!" (or something to that effect!) I LOVE reading her cute antidotes about her life and her children. I am like a kid in a candy store when she writes about me in her blog! It makes her laugh at me because I get so excited just to be in her blog.

So today, she let me know that she had posted an update, and we got to talking about it, and she suggested that I start a blog. I asked her what in the world I would blog about, and she suggested decorating! See, my dear cousin Stephanie thinks that I am extremely talented at decorating, where as I just think that I am able to see what someone else has done and copy it!

Either way, I will now be blogging about decorating. I just bought a home, and am starting a Kitchen remodel soon. I have a REALLY UGLY bedroom in my new home (it has the cheapest wood paneling I have EVER seen) and it will be transformed soon, too!

I have helped Steph redecorate her dining room, and come up with an idea for her friend Michelle to re-do her dining room, so I will post pictures of Steph's room soon, and hopefully Michelle's someday soon!