Dinning Room

Hello! I spent the weekend gathering up fun items to decorate our dining room table for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.  I love Thanksgiving.  It's one of the few times that my family sits around the table for a meal together as one is off at college and the other is busy working and spending time with his girlfriend.  That leaves our youngest at home so we spent the day outside looking for colorful pieces of nature to bring inside for the table.  I happen to love decorating with things from outdoors.  They are beautiful and don't cost a thing. Here's what I came up with... We found a tree with simple but colorful leaves and clipped a few branches to put them in a pitcher of water.  Then we found a few leaves scattered on the ground that we liked and placed them on the table.   Simple, but just the way I like it.  :) The painting on the wall behind the table I picked up at a flea market for $3.  I was completely smitten with it as it ...

I've wanted to do a chalkboard wall in our home forever but as you will see from the photos, our walls are very heavily textured and I didn't think I would be able to write on them.  But I just couldn't stand it anymore.  I really wanted one.  So, I tested it out first with a piece of chalk and tried writing on it, and surprisingly, it was no big deal at all.  Sure it isn't perfectly smooth, but I could write on it and it still looked fine.  That was all I needed to get busy and paint a side and I couldn't be more happy with the results. Of course, this did inspire a couple of other projects.  Isn't it funny how that always happens.  When my dad died, I inherited some of his wine collection.  He was quite a wine connoisseur and even though some of it is no longer drinkable, I will never get rid of it and I wanted to display some of it proudly.  I also wanted to display it on the wall against the chalkboard wall color.  I looked for a DIY...

One of the things I've loved so much about blogging this past year is how much I'm learning about home design, building my own furniture, and various wood treatments.  And I look forward to learning so much more.  Now that I work with wood for a living, I've also learned so much about different ways to age new wood, though, I'm certainly no expert. Several years ago when I decided to build a new dining room table with the table legs that my dad made, I really didn't know that much about any of those things, but we really needed a larger dining table for our larger than usual dining room and I really wanted to give those special table legs a purpose.  The tabletop I put together then was okay, but, I wasn't happy with the dark stain and polyurethane combo I used.  It didn't absorb into the wood, instead, it sat on top of the wood and dried to somewhat of a strange shine.  Neither of which I wanted.  I also longed for a thicker table top.  Preferably...