A Tanglewood we weave

Progressive Dining!

The center of tanglewood… the room with the most problems…. Is the dining room. This is an update, but not at all a finished project.

Why is this room the one with all the issues?

Because of the way the house was renovated, it is:

the largest space, with sightlines into 5 other rooms (if the doors are opened, which they aren’t often because puppy).
The wood floor had significant damages and scars from rennovations.
An open plan (not my favorite thing) room that flows right into the kitchen
A large room with no exterior walls or windows…. i.e. it’s DARK,

· So in this post, I’ll share some of the recent changes, but also mention some things I did before I started blogging. The biggest recent and ongoing project has been the floor. I have been doing the vinyl plank floor over the wood section by section as time and budget has allowed. This month… I finished it! I’ve gotten better at this, but it still has some challenges. Because I’m cutting the planks narrower, by hand, the gaps are not exactly even. So, I also had to fill in gaps with silicone caulk. But that’s not the most amusing issue. This flooring is sold in boxes of 36 square feet. By math, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to finish the floor exactly at the end of a box (of course not, it’s real life)…. But I hadn’t anticipated just how little of my last box I would need. Here’s a pic showing where box 6 ran out and box 7 had to be employed. (the blue is the painted wood being covered):

That gap is about 1.5” wide and runs 11’ 4” across. But I finished it! Hold on for pics, it’s coming!

I also decided now was the time to refinish my dining room table. This is a second hand table I got from an estate sale in college… so I’ve had it for 20 years. I’d refinished it 2 times already. In college, I painted it. After college, I stripped off the paint from the top (but not the legs, I’m lazy)… and I “stained” it with the darkest espresso stain/poly in one I could find. Younger me thought a good looking table had to have 12 coats of high gloss poly to be pretty. (I put “stained” in quotes because this stuff didn’t actually soak into the wood. It just sat on top, I discovered when I stripped it again.)

It took a lot of sanding and chemical stripping to get there. This is the last round for this table, as I went through the veneer in a couple of places. But it’s a solid table with a removeable leaf and two drop leaves. It can shrink down to less than 3 feet and expand to close to 8 feet. And more importantly: It’s a table I already own! (this concept will guide a lot of my choices).

So Table finished, floor finished…. Ta da:

I used some mahogany stain I already had… I hadn’t intended to use color for the finish, but the veneer burn throughs needed to be disguised. On top of that, 4 coats of Danish Oil. I have really come to love penetrating finishes.

Project next: separate the dining room from the kitchen without breaking up the flow…. I hate that it feels like the big black fridge is in the dining room.

What I want to evoke is craftsman style room divider cabinets. It’s not exactly traditional, these pony wall cabinets usually would separate a parlor or living room from the dining room. But I think it suits the purpose. Here’s some examples of classic room dividers borrowed from Houz:

Enter second hand cabinets from FB marketplace… and a section of wooden counter top made by my dad (same as kitchen counters)….

Looks good, huh? I liked it so much, I decided it needed another section to balance it… but narrower. This is going to be a longer project. I didn’t want to spend the money on a custom cabinet to match this custom cabinet… so I bought a third hand cabinet that I will alter and paint to match. (This hasn’t happened yet… but it’s coming)

Finally, let’s look at the ceiling: I scraped the popcorn, patched cracks, and papered it with textured paper… in an earlier project, I installed recessed LED lights around the room, which are on a separate switch, so I can light the whole room (quite bright) or turn on just the chandelier to give a cozy glow: