Naomi – Author at Plaster & Disaster

Top of the list for my 2017 house goals is to finish the decoration of my dining room, and I want to get it done pretty soon. You might think this is pretty foolish – particularly because I only just now finished the makeover of my bedroom and said that the main thing I learned from that was that I am not good at making over rooms quickly.

However, I have hopes that I can do the dining room project much quicker than that. I’ll tell you why, and then you all can go ahead and laugh at me when I post my final reveal in the year 2024.

The dining room is one of our farther-along rooms in the house, and I already have a lot of foundational pieces in place, so this really isn’t a start from scratch makeover. I love the direction the room is going and so all I actually need to do is get it over the finish line.

Here it is when we started:

Yikes. It was tiny, cramped, beige, and smelly. Sometimes I feel like I am not making any progress, and when I look at those before photos it makes me feel so much better.

Here it is when you last saw it:

OMG so much better. A lot of work and projects and have already gone into this room:

We removed the wall in our renovation to open it up to the kitchen and added a new bay window, making it open and bright. As much as I love storage, I don’t miss those built-ins!
I finally painted my window sashes as part of my bedroom project.
We painted the built-in that remains white, and now I love the strange retro detail on it.
I spent forever picking out a rug that is the perfect size for the space.
I also spent forever picking out a chandelier, which I finally installed with a new ceiling medallion to cover up an unfortunate hole in the ceiling.
I transformed a cabinet that Sage and I salvaged from a science classroom in a condemned high school into a yellow console with storage.
I figured out an approach to record-player storage using some old crates that I already had.
(Not really part of the dining room but close) I added a cabinet by the door so that papers wouldn’t keep ending up on the dining room table.

So you can see that I have actually been working on this makeover for a while now, just in a haphazard way, and without talking about it as a project on this blog. I am hoping that by giving myself a little structure and making a commitment here, that I’ll actually be motivated to get this done soon. I love the pieces of this room so much (I’d go so far as to say it is my favorite room of the house, even over my totally finished bedroom) so I think I’ll be really happy when it is complete.

So what needs to be done? The list isn’t too long, but it isn’t nothing either.

Here is the project plan:

Buy and/or re-hab a statement china cabinet or other storage for the corner, in a dark or medium wood tone and preferably with a lot of closed storage.
Buy a dining room table and chairs. The ones I’ve got in there were free with my first apartment out of college because the people moving out didn’t want them any more – and I’m still using them nearly 9 years later.
DIY or buy a solution to bird seed storage – Brad currently keeps the bird seed for his feeders in this room in a bright green bin. It is functional, but not the look we’re going for in the long run.
Re-organize. I need a lot more function out of this room. It currently stores wine/alcohol, cook books, the watering can for my plants, and a few other miscellaneous things. Given how cramped our kitchen is, I need this room to also store overflow food that we buy in bulk, appliances that we infrequently use, serving dishes, and hopefully a whole lot more. Maybe the board games that are currently jammed in the top of our coat closet?
Add some character. I want this room to hit you over the head with fun, so I want to work in some strange art, cool craft, and/or funky details.

See, totally achievable by 2024! I have high hopes for getting this done with some amount of speed and dedication. Please call me out if I don’t!

DIY blogland is all about beautiful (and sometimes way overexposed) photos, so we do our best to deliver. Sure we share grainy cell phone pictures taken at night in the basement more often than other bloggers seem to, but we also do try to make things look pretty.

Getting these shots isn’t always easy, though — we don’t actually live in pristine white homes where we’re frequently home during daylight hours, the sunlight is always perfectly diffused, and the rooms are expansive enough to get any angle you want. No, we live in places like this:

But since this is Plaster & Disaster, we like to capitalize on the fact that you expect us to be honest with you, and turn that into humorous blog fodder. That’s why one of our favorite recurring posts is “truth behind the photo,” where we show you the ridiculous things we do to get photos for this here blog.

Like that time Sage climbed up a ladder outside her house in order to photograph the shelves in her study straight-on:

Or the time Naomi pretended that her kitchen floor was actually her fridge in order to make magnets look pretty.

In that spirit, fresh off of the amazing and very-blogger party we threw a few weeks ago to celebrate our blog anniversary, we wanted to share a bit more about what was actually going on.

First off, we’d originally planned our blog anniversary celebration to take place a week earlier (the week of our actual anniversary…), but while on vacation visiting family for the holidays, Naomi got horrendously sick. We were planning to get together the day after she got back to do all the projects for our anniversary posts, but it was obvious that she should be resting in bed, not trying to make mocktails and cookies. We were able to reschedule for a week later and push our posts schedule by a week.

But it was still a crunch, because in these parts the sun sets at approximately 4:30pm…and the cardinal rule of Good Photography is that you need natural light. By the time we finished brainstorming all our amazing projects and picked up supplies, it was like 3pm and the race was on to do a new photoshoot for our profile picture, make our ridiculous crafts, and then photograph them before the sun set.

It was a little dark (and a lot awkward and messy) in Sage’s living room for our profile picture photoshoot:

Naomi made her “my lips are smiling but I am currently plotting my revenge on you” face:

And then promptly had her revenge by making Sage do this:

Fortunately the bad lighting and mess was nothing that cropping and overexposing the picture couldn’t take care of. For instance, here’s this original photo that makes you wonder why two grown women subjected themselves to this pain:

And the edited version that makes you think we’re real bloggers:

Things started to get really frantic as we prepared the food and decor for our “dinner party” (there was neither dinner nor partying). We had about 45 minutes to inflate and paint balloons, decorate cookies, come up with and execute a hilarious and delicious-looking mocktail, set-up our party scene, and photograph every step along the way. There was a lot of frantic running around.

Fortunately we had Naomi’s white plywood backdrops in order to make this scene:

Look like this:

By the the time we finished our projects, the sun was almost down, so Naomi finished setting the table while Sage got the camera set up for a loooooong exposure.

Obligatory test shots (in which the exposure was so long that Naomi looks like a ghost) ensued:

And you would never guess that the room actually looked like this:

When we managed to snap this final picture:

The long exposure (coupled with some light editing) is really a miracle-worker, especially in the Northeast during the winter when it’s basically always dark.

We hope this doesn’t undermine how impressed you were with our beautiful party (if anything it should make you respect us even more for somehow managing to pull this off despite having been sidelined by the plague and then clearly having started way too late in the day)!