painting the dining room. finally.

I've been slowly updating our dining room since we bought our house in 2008. I've found it to be a hard room to design - in part because it's visible from both the TV room and the Living room, which means I wanted the design of the room to work with all rooms that adjoin it.  We've been developing a style throughout the house and I was I think deep down, waiting to see how other rooms came together which would in the end, dictate the look of this room.

One of the best decisions we did for this room was in 2011 we added a chair rail. After we did the chair rail, I had the best intentions but I couldn't decide on a colour. So the room has stayed Cloud White for the last two years (with the bottom half of the wall Chantilly Lace). And although I love white - this room desperately needed some colour - You see, the white made it too bright of a room to sit in for dinner, and it wasn't warm or cozy at all. You didn't want to sit here for long for dinner. Yeah, that's not great.

So knowing that I needed to do something I became set on doing wallpaper - specifically grass cloth - but indecision and cost were major road blocks.  Once I came to the conclusion that grasscloth just wasn't in the cards, I focused on paint.

I've been on a painting kick lately (more to come on those projects) and came across the colour Edgecomb Gray by Benjamin Moore. After painting some furniture in it (and loving it) and doing the right thing by painting a swatch on the wall (See above, it's the top colour). I was positive I had found THE colour for the room. So I spent a great deal of time prepping and painting....

....only to decide it was NOT at all what I wanted. It was way less gray than I had hoped and more taupey in this room.  It also did nothing for my gorgeous dining room chairs that I adore, and it made our chandelier (that I have no budget or desire to replace) look dated. I was super annoyed because I had done everything right - painted a swatch, seen the colour in person. But it goes to show you sometimes colours just don't work.

I swore to Aubrey that I'd leave the room for 1 month and not touch it. As you (and he) likely guessed - I lasted seven days before I repainted the entire room. This time, I took a chance by going with Rockport Gray, again, by Benjamin Moore.  I looked over Pinterest and it seemed to be a consistently gorgeous colour in different lighting situations. This time I skipped the paint sample and just went full on into repainting...

And I'm SO GLAD I switched. Rockport Gray is sooooo gorgeous. BUT - what I love about this room is what I did on the ceiling....

Instead of stopping where the ceiling & wall meet - I continued to paint the ceiling in Rockport Gray. I took this risk for two reasons. The ceiling is pretty awful - years of plastering and bad fix jobs left it uneven. It was going to be very, very hard to get a straight line and it would have forever bugged me. Second - stopping the paint at the traditional spot of the ceiling made the room look more "dated" or, perhaps "traditional" than I wanted. We're young and hip (ok, maybe not hip) By bringing the colour up to the ceiling and all over the ceiling it made it slightly more modern, and, makes the room feel cozier. Also - your eye isn't broken up by start and stopping points that we would have had because we have the chair rail. Anyhow, it was a risk to do, but I'm SO glad I did it.

So there you have it. Rockport Gray - The winning colour. The room still needs some updates so a full out before & after is in the works. But I had to show this progress. :)

Posts of interest: Steps in transforming our Dining Room, Dining Room Chairs, Adding a Chair Rail Part 1, Chair Rail Part 2,  Chair Rail Part 3, Chair Rail Done,