I never did take “after” pictures of our dining room. Since we had guests for dinner last night, I cleaned it up and this morning I decided to snap some pictures before it got messy again. :-) It hasn’t changed that much, which is another reason I never bothered with “after” pictures.

First, the “before”:

And now for the “after” pictures, taken yesterday while Savannah was eating breakfast:

It didn’t change all that much, so here is a list of the things we did:
* We removed the curtains (we still need to patch up the holes from there!). The curtains were dirty, but were actually really thick, so we used them as drop cloths for painting. They were excellent drop cloths!
* Removed the borderprint, and then painted all the walls a light yellow. We also painted the ceiling white.
* Refinished the hardwood floor.
* Last summer we removed the add-on sunporch from the back. That made a tremendous difference in the light! The room (and the whole main level of the house) is SO much brighter.
* Put up vertical blinds for privacy once the sunporch was gone.
* Replaced the side door that headed to the carport. This was a hollow wooden interior door that locked with a variety of little locks that any determined person could pop open. Actually, those locks were a little crooked so in order to lock them we couldn’t shut the door completely. We put in a steel door with a deadbolt.

Here’s a better picture of the side door:

This picture isn’t great, but here’s a closeup of the ugly chandelier, which we hope to replace someday:

As I said, this room hasn’t changed that much since we bought the house.