Today is an exciting day.
You get to see where I eat breakfast!
And lunch.
And dinner.
Sometimes a snack or…three.
That’s right, it is Colonial Farmhouse Dining Room Day.
If you are new here, two months ago we bought a really, really old house.
Old houses are quirky. Ours is no exception. This house has no formal or informal foyer space, which would drive me nuts if I didn’t have a thousand other things that were already doing that.
When you walk through the front door of our Colonial Farmhouse, you are walking into the original room of this house (circa late 1700s). The previous owners used it as a living room, but because there is no seating space in our kitchen we are using it as a dining room. And our entry. And a pass-through to all the other areas of the house.
It is a hard-working, 16’x16′ space!
This is the dining room on the day we received the keys to the Colonial Farmhouse. The picture was taken from the front door and looking to the left.
The furniture and household items you see in the above picture are a small fraction of the items left in the Colonial Farmhouse by the seller.
What you can’t see are the countless cobwebs on the beams or the balls of cat hair in every nook and cranny. What you can’t smell is that recliner. Trust me…you don’t want your nostrils to burn in that way.
There is an original fireplace in this room that works. It does have a chimney plug because the previous owners used that space to hold their tv (see their tv stand below) instead of using the fireplace to heat the house.
There were also intricate stencils on the doors next to the fireplace. It is hard to see the stencil on the right, but they are paintings of faux shelves with faux doilies, plants and bottles. I’ll bet you haven’t seen that anywhere!
Those doors open to a closet, by the way.
Since we have moved in, all I have done to this room is cleaned and painted.
And cleaned and cleaned some more.
This is what you see when you walk in now.
Original beams. Original floors. Both from the late 1700s.
And my dining table from the…early 2000s.
The walls of this room are stone and a doozy to drill through to hang a gigantic, old window.
Just ask Handy Husband.
No. Don’t. It’s too soon.
The fireplace is also original and would have been where all the cooking was done when the house was built. The fireplace has had some “updates” over the years. We are pretty sure the hearth is new…whatever “new” in a house this old means.
It’s hard, in a picture, to convey the scale of this fireplace. It. is. massive.
The brick opening is 5 feet wide. From the floor to the top of the mantel is just over 5 feet tall. Handy Husband cut the logs in the fireplace to 32 inches in length and in this picture they seem so puny!
The floor planks are roughly 12 inches wide. There are deep grooves between some of the planks, which do an awesome job of catching all the cereal my kids drop on the floor.
However, even this nuisance does not damper my love for these wood floors. They are what made me fall in love with this money pit Colonial Farmhouse in the first place.
Now, what I do not love about this room is the ugly 1980s ceiling fan. I wasn’t even going to show you an after picture with the fan in it, but where’s the fun in that? This is real life.
That fan is the only light in this very dark room. THE ONLY LIGHT. It’s not even centered on the room. I’m guessing it was placed there because running the electrical was hard in a house with stone walls and this was the easiest place to put a light.
There are two windows in this room, but they look out onto a covered front porch. (See that space here.) Covered porches are amazing, but they block a lot of light from entering the house.
We’ve gone around and around about what to do with the lighting situation in this dining room. We now have a running joke about installing “historically accurate recessed lights.”
Yes, we crack ourselves up over here!
Honestly though, we haven’t been in a hurry to rip that ceiling fan down because we haven’t turned it off since we moved in. It is summer and we don’t have central air-conditioning. A little air movement is necessary. But once the temperatures drop to something slightly cooler than Hades, all bets are off.
In the meantime, I am enjoying our Colonial Farmhouse dining room so dang much. It makes me happy to be in there, which is a good thing since I’m not one to skip a meal!
By no means is this dining room done. The only thing I’ve hung on the wall is that window, so there are still plenty of design elements to figure out. All in good time, my friends. All in good time.
Room Details
Table and chairs are 15 years old and it is a convoluted story of how I acquired them.
The window was salvaged from our house in Oregon. The picture is of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and was taken by Handy Husband.
Copper pitcher, wood candlesticks and amber jar were left by the seller.
Wall paint is Behr’s Arcade White in eggshell enamel.
Trim paint is Behr’s Bit of Sugar in semi-gloss.
Here are some other posts you might enjoy!
The dining room in our Georgia house.
Our Colonial Farmhouse living room in progress.
How I refinished the dining table top here and the chairs here.
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