One of the changes we have made to our house very slowly is the dining room. It's really more of a dining area since our house has an open floor plan and only one dining area. Here is it shortly after we bought the house.

This picture cracks me up every time I see it. Corndog had been begging to help us paint the house. We felt compelled to repaint every room and many ceilings before we moved in. SH chose this wall for him to paint since it was just a big wall with nothing to paint around other than one outlet. SH painted the circle around the outlet and told him to paint everything else. So of course, he painted his name in big letters and then got serious about painting the wall. Corndog was 6 at the time. Just a few weeks after we moved in he was talking to a lady at church and told her his family moved every 4 years and when we do we "make" him repaint the house. He claimed he had already painted 3 or 4 houses at the ripe old age of 6. (She thought it was funny, too. That's how I know about the conversation.)

Anyway, initally all we did was paint and put up some curtains and then lived with it for 4 years, like this:

It was not offensive, just pretty boring. When the table was centered under the light, we had a big space along the wall. We brought plants indoors over the winter and set them there, but mostly it was just space. But I had a plan, and just needed a carpenter and some new furniture to pull it all together..........

In April a friend, who is also a carpenter, helped SH build in the storage bench I wanted along the empty wall. Here are of of the "during" pictures.

As you can see, Corndog is doing some more painting in the dining room 4 years after we moved in, with his trusty sidekick close by. Oh wait, in this picture he is sinking nail heads in the trim, but he did do some more painting. Here:

Then my MIL spent a weekend with me while the boys were fishing and we made lots and lots of pillows. And of course, I ordered a couple of pieces of new furniture (furniture shopping is much more fun that car shopping ;-))) to get a dining room that looks like this.

So, I now have lots of room to store Christmas decorations under the bench--I won't have to go back into the attic in January. Yea! We can seat more people comfortably around the table. And by moving the new table closer to the wall it freed up room between the table and living area so that we can dance daily, or set up a card table when we have a really big crowd for dinner.

I haven't completely finished the Dining Room ToDo List. I still want to 1.) replace the light fixture with one that is more centered over the table and looks more like the funky pendants over the bar, and 2.) I need to make the cushion for the seat of the bench, and 3.) would love to have a display ledge the length of the wall and high enough over the bench that no one will bump their head on it. But at least now it looks like our dining room rather than a boring spot next to the kitchen where we have our table. Hopefully the rest of the changes won't take 4 years to get to.