Dining Room: Chandelier

When we moved in the dining room was hideous. One wall was painted a dark burgandy, it had 1970s track lighting, and the louvered doors. UGH.

Repainting was easy enough, ditto removing the doors, and there is still the hideous floor tile to be removed. But the lighting solution was a bit more involved. For one thing, the previous owners had decided to put an awful texture on the ceiling, but not popcorn, or something that could be "easily" scrapped off. We think they mixed drywall compound with gloss paint and applied it in a goopy fashion to create zillions of stalactites. Before we moved in, we had a new HVAC installed, which meant new vents in the ceiling and we removed the upper kitchen cabinets (which appear on the very left hand side of the photo above) to open the kitchen and dining room up to each other a bit more. So there was a lot of ceiling repair needed.

We went to Home Depot and rented a drywall sander that hooks up to your shop vac (to cut down on dust). It sort of looked like a metal detector, only you had to press it against the ceiling (which was hard because it was heavy). No pictures of the sanding happening, but below Dave surveys the work to be done. You can also see that we put up drop cloths to prevent dust from going throughout the entire house (the shop vac systems worked, but still a lot of dust was generated). Oh and we had to buy a special drywall bag for the shop vac, as the dust particles are too fine for the normal set up.

After the sanding, we painted the ceiling flat white, why oh why did the previous owners of both our homes paint all the ceilings gloss? The ceilings aren't perfect, but they look a lot better, and really how many people come in and stare at your ceiling?

Now we could move onto the fun stuff. A new chandelier!

 I got this chandelier at a neighbor's garage sale for $20. He contends it was hand made in Texas and is one of a kind! It's gorgeous and looks like something that would cost one zillion times the price at Restoration Hardware. Of course I then proceeded to spend $70 on new faux beeswax "candle" covers. But I'm so pleased with the final product. AND I sold the Italian glass chandelier from our old house on Craigslist for the same price that I bought it for on ebay all those many years ago.