Our dining room was one of the features that I fell in love with this house. The biggest issue with the dining room was the outdated color and wallpaper. It was this sage green color that wasn’t the nice modern sage green paint you see nowadays trending, the wallpaper was extremely outdated and peeling, and then there was a coordinating border placed midway on the wall was crooked and peeling. It all just needed to go! Painting was the biggest step in updating the dining room.
When we decided to start tackling the daunting task of taking down the wallpaper, we knew this was going to be a time-consuming job. However, we were not expecting it to take as long as it did nor for it to be as difficult as it was. Shortly after we started to peel off the wallpaper we quickly discovered there were multiple layers of wallpaper. There were at least two layers, maybe three. I am by no means an expert, but I am telling you, it was either two or three layers of wallpaper over a layer of really bad paint that we ended up having to scrape off too.
Removing the wallpaper was a family affair and the littles truly enjoyed helping us rip the pieces off. Even Ignatius, our two-year-old, helped. Admittedly us being such a busy family was a huge factor in how long it took to prep for painting (why must I have to feed the kids).
After taking THREE months to get the wallpaper down, we filled any holes and sanded all the walls several times using. There was so much reapplying putty and sanding! The wall that had all the wallpaper needed to the most amount of prep work.
Since this wall had the most amount of defects it was the only wall we applied primer on. Kilz brand is what was recommended by the paint assistant at Home Depot. We let the kids help prime the wall. I’m not going to lie, I only trusted them with the priming part.
I have probably spent a good portion of the past year contemplating what color to paint the dining room. I wanted something that was going to give off a bright, neutral, cozy feeling and would also compliment the paint color we choose in the kitchen. I swear I was having a huge fear of commitment picking out paint colors. My sweet husband has been so patient with my crazed indecisiveness throughout this project. We sampled a total of seven different colors of paint before finally settling on the color.
And the winner is … Benjamin Moore’s Collingwood. Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with our choice. Although it was a Benjamin Moore paint color we had it color matched in Sherwin-Williams Showcase paint. The reason we went with Sherwin-Williams is that Lowe’s had a great sale going on at the time we ready to buy paint.
***tip – wait till around holidays like memorial or Labor Day to buy paint to save money
Once we were finally done with prepping the walls, hallelujah, we were able to get to the fun part of the painting- actually painting!!
I will say that even though Sherwin-Williams Showcase paint claims that you need only one coat of paint, we ended up having to apply three. Based on some of the reviews I read while researching, I already expected that it was going to take more than one coat. However, I was pleasantly surprised that even with using three coats of paint, we only ended up using a little over one gallon of paint. Here are some pictures after one coat of paint. You can definitely still see some green showing through.
Once everything was said and done, the results were doubtlessly worth it!! I am LOVING how it all turned out! Just like the cliche saying – a little bit of paint can make a big difference.
The only issue which is pretty minor, the wall we primed is slightly different than the walls that were not primed. Priming only the one wall was not the best move. Either way, I still love the final results! Check out our full dining room makeover…
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