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Hello!  I am Cassie from Primitive and Proper and I am so excited to be a new monthly contributor at Remodelaholic!  This blog was one of the very first I ever followed, so to now be writing for it is kind of surreal.  We just moved into our new home in October, and it needs a lot of cosmetic updating, so the good news is I will have  a lot to share!

My favorite colors are grays and aquas, so much of our house is being done in those colors.  When we moved into the house, it was brown, brown, more brown, and icky white walls.  I love white walls, but these were a horrible white that looked like yellowed teeth.  Eew, right?

Today I am going to share with you a room that was redone in my colors…. out with the brown and stained teeth, in with the gray and aqua!

Meet our new dining room.  This is what it looked like the wee we moved in.

All I loved about it was the furniture, and the view; and I brought the furniture myself!  However, I knew I wanted to keep the room open feeling, so I wanted to ditch the china cabinet in favor of a sideboard.

I planned on painting this room in grays and whites, though I wasn’t sure how I would set it up with the chair rail and all.  Oh, and of course I painted the trim and chair rail!  Anyhow, I was perusing pinterest for some ideas of what to do below a chair rail, and came across this image:

It completely inspired me and I decided then and there that I needed to paint my walls white (Cloud Cover by Benjamin Moore), trim (Simple White also by BM) and below needed to have gray stripes (Platinum Gray by BM.)

So I began by priming and painting all of the trim, and then painting the walls all white.  Then I measured the distance between the baseboard and chair rail so I could figure out mathematically how many stripes of each color.  I carefully measured and taped my walls and painted the gray stripes on.

While the paint was still wet I pulled the tape off, as it pulls off best that way.  And voila… stripes!

The next step I needed to take was replacing my china cabinet with a sideboard.  I searched craigslist for a month or so and finally a friend found one for me for $75 that was perfect- I needed it to be sizable and stylish!  Here is the perfect piece in its before state…

It was a little sad and worn looking, but nothing that paint and new hardware couldn’t fix!  I sanded it down with an orbital sander, primed it, and panted it with two coats of Dutch Boy’s Lake Champlain which went on beautifully!  I then distressed it by hand with 150 grit sandpaper.  Then I went over it all with Minwax Golden Oak stain just to warm and age it a bit.  The final step was to rub a paste wax over it all for protection.  And here it is now, in the dining room- I love the aqua against the gray stripes!  (Here you can see it decorated for Valentine’s Day)

Here are a couple other glimpses around the room…

This picture shows some peacock artwork I recently created with a stencil and plywood! The “frames” are actually just paint.

And the best part about this room, is something created not by me, but by the hand of God…. Just look at that view…

We now love to entertain in this room! And I am happy to have a room checked off my long list! I hope you will hop over to my blog to follow along as we make this house our home!

Cassity, thank you so much for allowing me to share!  I look forward to coming to hang out with you  all the second Thursday of every month!

Please be sure to go Check out Cassie’s blog  Primitive and Proper you will totally inspired!