Our dining room was the first room we really plunged into. It was a room that we knew would look ok with just a quick facelift, so it has been our “showcase” room, the one that illustrates our house’s potential and keeps people from thinking we are crazy folk.

I’ve been holing off on posting before and afters because it isn’t really done…. but, realizing that nothing in this place will ever be “done” to our liking, now is probaby a good time to report on our progress.

(Keep reading for photos…)

Last week, we finally got around to rewiring the dining room ceiling light and hanging the chandelier. This beautiful thing was a housewarming gift from my grandparents – we never would have gotten ourselves something so pretty if not for their generosity. The project soon escalated (of course) when we found that there were various oddly-placed beams running through the wall, preventing us from getting any wiring from the light switch to the ceiling. AND, there was something blocking the wiring from the ceiling, too. These things no longer surprise us, just perplex us. Teague finally decided that the least-awful way to get the new wiring in would be to notch out the plaster and drywall, and embed the wiring like so:

Doing this made me cringe, but it was better than ripping out large chunks of the wall to find the many obstacles, right? After we stapled the new wire in, we sheetrocked over everything and repainted the wall, and you really can’t tell we did anything destructive!

Here’s the pics – we’ll call them Before and During, since it’s not quite an After:

BEFORE

DURING