When we bought this bungalow style home, we knew we wanted to modernize it and make it have our own unique style, without destroying the beautiful older elements in the space.
I’ll show you exactly how we took this…
…to this
If you don’t know me- Hi, I’m Lexi! I work closely with my sister and my husband to renovate homes, and I document it here! If you want to stay up to date on what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it, sign up to receive emails when I make a new post below.
This house was a 1930’s bungalow in the cutest part of town. So much of the house showed the wear and tear of a house that’s been around for almost 100 years would, I knew I wanted to keep some of the older elements in the house and work with them.
The good:
This dining room sat between the living room and kitchen, had amazing natural light, STUNNING french doors, and so much potential.
Don’t worry, I kept the wood trim and french doors.
The bad:
The first step was getting rid of everything we weren’t keeping. The mirrored wall, wallpapered ceiling accent, chandelier, and old hardware all had to go.
Luckily for me, there was also wallpaper under the wall of mirrors that I got to scrape off!
I had been wanting to design a dining room like this for a while, so it didn’t take me long to come up with a game plan. I picked out a wallpaper and a new light fixture. You can find the wallpaper here and the light here.
I added new handles to the french doors and they turned out beautifully! Here are the handles I used:
Getting started
Once we smoothed out the walls, textured the ceiling, refinished the floors, and re-stained the trim, we got started on the fun part! Since we were splitting the design in half horizontally, we painted the bottom half black. We used Limousine Leather by Behr in flat.
Time to wallpaper!
Next, we started the wallpapering process. In full transparency, this was my first and last time ever wallpapering. (Or at least until I find another wallpaper I love.)
Wallpapering a space this large and using a wallpaper with such a tedious design was TOUGH. The design on the paper had to line up perfectly, which was much harder than I thought it would be.
We worked on it for days, but it was worth it. Look how cool! We knew the bottom would be covered with the wood, so we didn’t worry about it being even at the bottom.
Once the top half of the room was wallpapered, we cut the MDF board into the sizes we wanted for the bottom half.
The wood on the wall was in four different parts, the large horizontal piece on top, a smaller piece on top of that, a horizontal small piece on the bottom, and the small vertical pieces.
We cut the top piece 6″ wide, and the vertical pieces into 1.5″ wide strips.
We attached the widest top piece first- using liquid nails on the back and securing it with brad nails.
Then, we attached the bottom horizontal pieces, then the vertical pieces using the same method of liquid nails and brad nails.
We decided on how large we wanted the gaps between pieces, and measured them out before we started. We used a level and spacers between each piece. This got tricky, so it helped having extra hands there with me.
Once we got everything up, we used wood filler to fill the gaps and nail holes. We sanded the wood and decided to switch from flat to semi gloss on the accent pieces to really make them pop!
I’m so happy we made the accent pieces semi-gloss- it really paid off in the end and looked beautiful.
Here’s the finished product!
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