House Update May 2015

At five years in we started on the dining room.  We routed and put up a chair rail, so our two-tone walls finally make sense.  We painted the chair rail and all the matching trim.  We repaired the built in cabinets, which had numerous internal flaws.  In the process we found where a secret compartment  had been installed in the 1920s, only to be taken out by the renovations of the 1970s.  We painted the outside of the built-ins to match the chair rail and the trim, lined the shelves, rehung the doors and installed new hardware.  There had been a misguided attempt to drag the interior into the Modern era which it resisted fiercly.  We gently took it back to the time of the bungalow, and the house looks much happier.

Then we fixed up my adoptive parents' faux-Victorian china cabinet and moved it into the dining room, where it fit the china-cabinet space perfectly.  To be honest we had looked at some Craftsmen-style pieces, but the modern reproductions are too big for the space and the originals are too expensive.  But what matters is that after 27 years of marriage I'll finally be able to unbox the good china.

There's still the curtain hardware and some decorative pieces to install, but at 5 1/3 years the majority of the work on the dining room is done.