September 23: New Curtains, Dining Room Edition

Remember those new curtains I bought at Ikea a while back?  They have been hanging in our living/dining rooms for a few weeks now.  But I just got the house clean enough yesterday to take some pictures to post here!  =)

Here is a before and after look at one of the dining room windows.  The old curtains were super cheap ($7 per pair, on clearance at Target) sheer white curtains.  They didn't look awful, but they were pretty neutral and didn't add much interest to the room.  The new curtains, while not super wild, make a bolder statement, I think.

We chose to hang the new curtains higher and wider than the actual window, because every home design show or blog that I have seen says that is what you are supposed to do.  It definitely make the room feel taller.  Here is a picture I took while we were hanging them, showing the difference between the placement of the old and new curtains.

Once we hung the curtains higher and wider though, that wall with the bookshelf looked really crowded.  I have never been a fan of the bookshelf in the dining room, but we just didn't have anywhere else to put it (and I wasn't ready to part with my books yet!).  The new curtains necessitated that we find a new place for the bookshelf though, so we did.  We ended up sending most of our Bible college/Christian resource books that were on a shelf in our piano room to Daniel's office at church.  Then we moved this bookshelf into the piano room and moved that bookshelf to storage for now.  Why didn't we think to do that a long time ago?

The room and the curtains looked so much better when we got that bookshelf out of there!  I'm thinking a small console table or hutch in between the two windows might be nice someday.  But someday is very, very far away right now.

 

 I like interior design.  I don't claim to know much about it or be very good at it, and we don't have a lot of money to spend on projects. But I do enjoy decorating and re-decorating and then re-decorating again!  It's a good thing we don't have much money, or I would probably be wanting to redo our rooms all the time.  Instead I just have an ever growing list of projects that I would like to complete around the house...someday!

I consider our house to always be a work in progress, and I think it's fun to watch it evolve over time.  I'd like to do a better job of taking pictures of those changes.  I have this picture of our dining room right before we moved into the house:

Here is what our dining room looked like after we moved in.  This was in 2005.

I don't have any other pictures of our dining room, but it has gone through a few little changes over the years.  Here is what it looks like today:

And the view from the living room.

 A new dining room table would be high on my list of dining room projects someday (but again someday is very, very far away!).  We bought this one before we bought the house, and I really wish we would have thought through that decision a little better.  The light wood color and the size are just not right for the space.  But it serves it's purpose as a place for our family to eat meals together so I suppose that is all that really matters.