We are in the midst of a busy home improvement Saturday around here. Already there has been a trip to Lowe’s, curtain hanging, lamp spray-priming, and firepit yard digging. That’s still going on, the digging is. But I can’t help–pregnant! Yep….digging while pregnant gives babies two heads, I think I read somewhere. And hanging curtains is such hard work that I’m taking a break to post. More on Firepit Weekend later (or Firepit Month–we’ll see which).

Today…layer two of the house tour continues, with a comparison of the dining room back before we moved in and now. Our old house had a tiny dining room that acted, at various stages in our nine years there, as a playroom, schoolroom, and office/music room, but never actually a dining room.

I kind of liked the idea of actually having a dining room in this house. We don’t have weekly dinner parties or anything, but we do usually host Thanksgiving for Dave’s side of the family and we have some other times when a room with a big table that seats a lot of people comes in handy (like the math club that Dave coaches. At the old house, this involved dragging tv trays out and setting them up in the living room. No more! Math club at the table, baby! Movin’ on up).

Yes, so we like to have wild and crazy math times around here and we need a table and a room to keep it in.   But I didn’t want a room that was just a dining room, either (truth be told, we mostly eat in the kitchen). My original plan, before we even picked out this particular house, was that our new house would have a dining room/schoolroom/library, with lovely shelves lining all the walls. I pinned several examples to inspire me, such as:

I can’t get as good of an angle as I could into the library….must purchase wide angle lens (with magic money). Okay, so this is the view from the foyer. That table and the buffet were housewarming gifts from my mother (who, along with my aunts, owns a really cool shop that sells second-hand and antique furniture/stuff: A Classy Flea). Table and chairs are of unknown origin; the buffet is from Lane, orginally. The table has another leaf that can go in it and two more chairs (chairs are slightly mismatched, you might notice. I’d like to someday get more that are closer to the style of the ones with the round spindles, as I like them better and they’re more comfortable, but it’s all close enough for now). When the leaf is in, we can seat as many as 10 people in relative comfort.

The buffet is pretty, and it’s also HUGE. It holds tons and tons of stuff–like all the currently used school stuff that needs to stay hidden when not in use so that the room can look like a real dining room. Generally speaking, there are piles of books and a computer or two all over the table. But each kid has his own compartment in the buffet where his stuff goes, so it’s pretty quick to whisk it all away when needed.

We’ve had that painting–we’ll call it the Sad Pilgrim painting (I guess they’re pilgrims. They’re dressed up like pilgrims) forever. It’s an old oil painting, also from my mom, but it spent a long time in exile in our old basement because we couldn’t find the right spot for it at our old house. And it got kind of beat up in the process, and I feel guilty about that. But it’s still pretty! Also, it needs to be hung up instead of just leaning there. Ongoing theme in the house, it seems. Leaning is easier than hanging!