From Dining Room to Library/Game Room

Our Dining Room to Library/Game Room Update

I have another room finished and ready to share with you all! This photo below shows the formal dining room in our house as it was when we moved in. There was damaged wall paper and an antique light fixture (which I still need to have someone who knows what they are doing take a look at) that needed to come down. The shutters were covered in splattered paint and the trim needed help.It took us several weeks to decided what we wanted to do with this room. We didn’t feel like we needed a formal dining room, but could not figure out what we did need.

My husband (Let’s call him Mr. Bluebird 🙂 ) has been dabbling in some wood working since we moved, so I had an idea. We had taken our king sized bed apart and decided to go with a queen in our new place. I had white washed the king bed a few years ago and still love the way it looks, soooooo…. I thought the headboard would make a great table!

Then it hit me…that’s it! We will make this room a library/board game room. This way we have more table space when we have larger groups of friends or family over, and it’s a great space for all of our gazillions of books!

Here’s the headboard before Mr. Bluebird got started.

That whitewashed wood just makes me so happy 🙂

This is a photo inside Mr. Bluebird’s workshop. We still need to do a bit of work to the workshop itself, but that’s a job for another day (or year!!)

And here she is with her new legs.

He did a great job with this project. I may have to hire him again! 🙂 I painted the legs to match the top, and I’ll show you the end result in a bit.

Now back to the room….

I spent more time working on the walls in this room than any other room in this house. I did get some help from the family with scraping wallpaper. It turned out to be wallpaper on top of what’s called wallpaper paneling!! It was so much work to get that stuff down. Here’s a photo of the layers. We had to pull off the top, spray the furry part with hot water, and scrape and scrape and scrape.

The the wallpaper paneling was not coming down and not in great shape, so I had to put some type of texture on the wall to cover that up. I used a texture roller and a tub of joint compound to do this…

My next step was to paint the lower part of the wall and the trim. Here’s a photo of the textured, unpainted wall after I painted the trim white.

And here’s a photo after I painted the cream a pretty grey. It made a world of difference!

I painted the textured part of the wall white and called it done! Here’s a photo of the finished room with all of our books, our new awesome game table, and a few chairs that I picked up at a local thrift store for $30 each! I love how it all came together.

Our kitty cat, Preston, likes the new room, too 🙂 It’s a great reading room and a cozy place to cuddle up with your coffee and a book. Have you ever repurposed something in your home like we did with our headboard? I’d love to hear about what you’ve made!

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