Hubby and I put the (almost) finishing touches on the dining room yesterday.
All the walls were gray, gray, gray, and the floor was a darker gray. We wanted to carry our blue theme from the living room into the dining room without making it matchy-matchy.
When we were searching for a house, we knew we needed a couple of large walls, one for a giant mid-century room divider and one for a giant iceberg. While the polar caps are sadly melting, we have the good fortune to be the custodians of a large iceberg painting done by our son Ian.
We wanted it to hang on the long wall in the dining room, but we knew it would disappear into the light gray wall. Right after moving in, we bought a dark blue-gray paint to create an accent wall, and then we got busy. (But not so busy we couldn’t roll out the dark blue rug we bought from Ikea for the room.)
We hung the painting on the light gray wall, but then we brought in a credenza that was too tall to show off the entire painting, so we moved the painting to a shorter wall, where it kind of got lost. We created an artistic vignette by popping two matching green lamps and a blue-striped pot on the credenza and centering an abstract metal sculpture on the wall behind the credenza.
It looked pretty cool, but we still wanted to get Ian’s iceberg painting on this wall.
We brought in a lower credenza thinking it might leave room for the painting, but we still needed to paint the wall.
A little over a week ago, we finally got around to painting the wall.
It took only a few hours to prep and paint the wall with two coats of paint. You’d think dark paint would easily cover light paint in just one coat, but light paint seeps through dark paint and is readily visible without a second coat.
We moved the low credenza back in place and measured for the iceberg painting. It was going to fit, so we hung it.
The green lamps wouldn’t work because they would obscure the painting, so we found a smaller lamp and added a few other accessories.
Voila! The dark blue-gray accent wall was perfect for the iceberg painting.
Though the main focal point of the room was finished a week ago, we weren’t quite done with the room. Btw, even though this is the formal dining room, we aren’t using it as such. We have a large space off the kitchen that works better as a dining room, so we’re using the formal dining room as a decorative pass-through space and for overflow conversation space when we have guests over.
Yesterday, we put together my glass cabinet from Ikea and I filled it with my collection of decorative items and sculptures made by our kids. While I love the streamlined look of my Ikea cabinet, it is a pain in the tuchus to put together and takes at least two people to assemble it in order to avoid breaking any of the panels.
The cabinet is on one side of the wall opposite the iceberg painting. We rehung the abstract metal sculpture on the other side of the wall opposite the iceberg painting.
Finally, here is a view of the entire room:
We’re thinking of making a couple more adjustments to the room, which is why we are *almost* done. We’d like to change out the curtains and maybe add something under the metal sculpture.
It’s an evolution, but we’re really happy with the way the iceberg pops out of the accent wall.