So this is the Dining Room! :-(

Redecorating fever could not be suppressed so we started with the place that needed it the most.  As with most of the downstairs, the dining room was painted floor to ceiling with flat latex paint over oil base. The hue of the "lovely" sea foam green is realistically captured in this photo from Jan.-Feb of 1997 just a couple months after we moved in. As an added bonus notice that the lovely tile flooring is the same color as the walls. In fairness this was done to protect the hardwood floor from the Judge's eight children, and did do a good job at that.

We added the chandelier in the photo and ended up scraping all the paint off the wainscoting you can see lurking behind around the  walls. In the repainting we found that we had selected almost an identical color paint to that whic had been chosen many years ago - possibly the original decorators!

Keep scrolling down for what the job evolved into!

These are the latest photos from 10/98 illustrating the almost completed process. Newly refinished french doors that have recently been stripped and restored to their original red-mahogany finish.  Now we really must get to some kind of window treatment.