The Hope Family : Dining Room Reveal

So I have pictures of our dining room reveal!! Its a few days late, so Im sorry for that.... but here you go!

Before:

And after:

It took us about 2 weeks, but I did alot of prep before we actually started stenciling and doing the faux wainscoting. But, Im in love. We started with getting a new light fixture, which lead to a whole load of electrical issues, but thanks to our incredible brother in law, he was able to do some trouble shooting and get the issues fixed!! He was a life saver. I was not a happy lady, cooking dinner in a dark kitchen. Lets just say the electrical in this house is messed up!! Anyways. I bought the stencil from cuttingedgestencils.com . They had so many different designs, but Im going to be completely honest that I completely copied another design from a blog.

I started by painting the top an off white, and the bottom a baseboard and trim white. I only painted half the wall half and half, no sense wasting paint. We also had to remove the tiles that were around the dining room instead of baseboard. We weren't sure how easy or hard this would be, but once Andy got started they came off relatively quick and easy. Here a picture of my man hard at work.

You can see the difference in colors between the top and bottom.

If I had known how much work the stencil was going to be, I probably would've tried wallpaper. This was mentioned in the blog where I got the idea from, but it really was a lot of work. Sometimes the paint would get on the back of the stencil and mark up the wall, or the lines wouldn't be crisp. I still have quite a bit of touching up to do, but for the time being Im content with how it looks. We also started with the wrong type of tape to hold up the stencil... this green painters tape, did not work. But once we got the blue painters tape that they told us to (I was too cheap to buy the blue stuff, because we had 2 rolls of green tape at home) things went much quicker. Quite often Id have to stop halfway through and wash my stencil. Needless to say this stenciling was time consuming, and a lot of work. But I think it looks good.

Next we got started on the faux wainscoting and kept on trucking with the stencil.

Andys job was the wainscoting and my job was the stencil. We worked well together like this. Trying to keep 2 kids happy and finish our job was a lot of work, in the end we took shifts while the other worked.

Stenciling is done, and the wainscoting is up. Just needed to paint the bottom and get it done!! We were exhausted and just wanting to see this project finished at this point!! I had issues with getting the stencil to line up in the corners and top. After a few days of being totally discouraged and wanting to just cover it up. Andy suggested doing the edges solid in white, and I said the only way I'd do the edges thick is if we did brown... Im so happy we did, because Im extremely happy with the way it turned out. It makes the room look larger, and you cant tell we technically messed up with the stencil.