SUYL Dining Rooms

Happy Friday, friends! Today I am linking up with Kelly from Kelly's Korner for Show Us Your Life. This weeks topic is dining rooms :) Can I just say that we LOVE our dining room? Well, we do! It was one of the selling points for the house: it's centrally located and it was already red (our choice color!). I think it was meant to be! Oh and the wood floors...I can't forget to mention those beauties! Just some notes for those of you who may be new here or visiting from Kelly's blog: we bought our house in July 2011 and it was built in 1883. Yep, our house was built in the 1800s-cool, huh?

Without further adieu, welcome to our dining room:

We love the big bay window, and it's a perfect location for a beautiful Christmas tree!

This is the front door of the house, it opens directly into the dining room. The painting to the left was my Great-Grandmothers first oil painting. She was an amazing artist!

This is another one of our pride and joy's! We bought this from an antique market and refinished it last year. It was in pretty rough shape, but it is beautiful now. Inside is a display of my salt & pepper shaker collection.

Some shakers! :)

On top of the china cabinet is a little bit random right now. The vision in my head is all white table wear and maybe something hanging on the wall above...still working on it!

View from the stairs-here you are almost see our entire dining room. To the right is the living room and to the left is our kitchen!

This is looking at the dining room from the bay windows. The living room is to the left and kitchen to the right. The other doorway goes to the library!

I love, love, love our dining room light!

Stairs and console table...pretty self explanatory.

...and stairs again. One thing that we love about the stairs is the exposed brick. It adds so much charm and character to plain old stairs! This summer.fall we plan on painting the white wall too, so that will be a nice improvement!  :)

And that wraps up the tour of our dining room. Please let me now if you have any decorating ideas, tips or suggestions we could use. I am always looking for ways to spruce the place up a bit!

Flower Walk

Double Impatient-these may be my favorite little shade lovers. They look like mini-roses. Beautiful!

Well hello, friends! It's been a wild and crazy week in our neck of the woods! I apologize for posting so late in the week...again. Sometime other things just take priority over blogging, yes? Anyways, most of the pictures in this post were taken on my Monday night flower walk around the house. Enjoy!

Our snapdragons bloomed. This was exciting because we weren't sure they would ever bloom. They just kept getting taller and taller!

Pretty Carnations that smell WONDERFUL!

This one is a new addition to our flowers...Stephen is literally banning me from Garden Centers until Fall!

Our new Double Knock Out Rose bush...I love love LOVE it!

Soon to be Hibiscus flowers. They are purple and gorgeous!

The grass is growing...praise the Lord!

Another new addition...

Tomatoes! Is there anything better than garden fresh tomatoes? They are always SO good!

In other news this week-Louie was groomed on Monday and got his "summer cut". It looked like he lost 5 pounds in fur! It has taken me a couple days to get used to his new look, but since I know it's the best thing for him during summer I am starting to love it. He has been running around a lot more and not panting nearly as much, so I bet he is feeling lighter and cooler already! Do you get your dogs cut for summer?

How cute is he?!

We also had a fun little project this week: cleaning the porch for our new wicker furniture. I have spent several evenings on the porch already just reading, watching people or crafting and I LOVE it. It's a work in progress as I have many, many ideas for this little space-including: painting (stripes?), curtains, wreaths, and artwork. I will try and post as things progress so you can track the changes with me!

Last night I actually starting working on some little projects for the porch/outdoor living area. I had this idea and vision of what I wanted...in the end the outcome was pretty close, so I was pleased. Don't you love when that happens? Well here is the new handmade wreath that now greets you inside our porch, near the entrance to the house:

I am working on a larger one that will match (mostly) and that one will hang on the exterior door of the porch. It was a fun evening project and stress reliever. Win, win! :)

Well, I need to get going this morning so I must be leaving you. Have a great weekend everyone!

Me :)

Oh and I almost forgot... 14 DAYS UNTIL FLORIDA VACATION!!!

1st Floor Photo Tour!

Catch up with the upstairs photo tour here.

Since I seriously dropped the ball on doing our home tour, I thought I would revisit that idea! J I am so sorry that it has taken me this long to get these pictures taken, edited and posted to share with all my friends and family that are unable to come and visit us! Please accept my apology.

SO…

HERE GOES!

This is our front door, on the inside of our porch. I did not take a picture of the outside door because it was dark. BUT, you can refer to this post if you have forgotten how the front of the house looks!  

The front door opens up into our dining room, which is connected to all the rooms on the first floor. You could actually just walk in circles through all the rooms if you wanted. Ha, we have our own indoor track!

To the right in our dining room we have these big bay windows (that I love). We need some furniture to fill this space, but we are in no rush to get anything. Why? Well, because we are not sure exactly what we want or what would work in this space. Any ideas?

To the left side of the dining room we have our console table with odds and ends and our staircase to upstairs. There is also a doorway into the library (that’s what we call it) and the living room, too!  

This is looking into our living room from the dining room. Louie wanted to be in the picture, so you can see him too! I am not sure what color this is, it was here when we moved in. We have discussed painting the living room, but have no idea what color we’d like to change it to.

Fireplace & TV. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the fireplace? SO much!  

Our Sofa, painting by me and a little view of our big windows. The windows on this floor are the original windows from 1883. We really enjoy the shutters on the windows and that was a big selling point for us because we knew we would not have to worry about window treatments; which can be expensive!   

This is the view from the couch, looking through the dining room and into the kitchen.    

Entering the library…    

Our under the stairs coat and vacuum closet; I am so thankful that Stephen hung the hooks for the coats this weekend. Yay for having a place to hang jackets!     

This is the light fixture in the library. I kind of like it, kind of don’t. BUT it does flow well with the rest of the house so that means something! We were told that the older couple that used to live here eventually made this room their master bedroom because they had difficulty getting up and down the stairs.      

We use this room for DVDs, books and my craft/scrapbooking things. The plan is to put a daybed in here for an extra bed and reading area. Now, we just need to get starting on making one out of old doors!       

This bookshelf has mostly picture albums and scrapbooks on it. There are some paperback books too, but you can tell that I like to take pictures and document everything, ha! The butterfly rug was made by my little brother in elementary school (not sure what grade?) and he gave it to me as a Christmas gift. I still have it!        

The library connects to our half bath and laundry room. You can also get to the bath/laundry room through the kitchen. Louie’s kennel stays in this room during the day while we are gone, but we move it up to our room at night for sleepy time.          

      

Looking out the bathroom/laundry room into the kitchen…

And the kitchen. Quite possibly my favorite room in the house!

All the other houses we looked at had such dated kitchens that we would have needed to do some serious work. We were so blessed to find this house with beautiful cabinets, counters and newer appliances! God is so good!

Those cabinets on the left open up and have drawers that pull out. That is so awesome! It makes putting groceries and finding things SO much easier!  

The kitchen sink and window looking out into the mudroom…  

This is the door to/from the mudroom. We use this door daily when coming or going.   

And the mudroom! We just put the bench together last weekend and placed it out here so we could sit down and put our shoes on. I like having a place outside to do that because honestly, shoes do not belong in our house. We ordered a nice shoe rack too, but it has not arrived yet!    

These are all our shoes that will one day go on the shoe rack!     

And this is the door outside from the mudroom, that enters the backyard.      

And that, friends, is the tour of our first floor!  You may have noticed that the pictures are not perfect, and the house is not perfect. That is because we actually live here, and it shows. This is our home and we love it! Now, come on up and visit to see it for yourself…it is a little piece of history! (hint hint, family in FL!)       

Hope you enjoyed the tour! See ya next time!