Lisa: It almost looks like we're real adults!

The dining room really only got an accidental makeover, when Sarah and E helped me paint it green along with the living room. Again, though, the only photos I had were really old (and never before posted here), so I thought it would be fun to post those along with some updated ones.

Before:

These photos were taken soon after we moved in, with our little apartment furniture awkwardly trying to fill the spaces of a real house. The green and white table was a hand-me-down from my dad's mom, but it was stained dark brown before I repainted it to go in the kitchen of our second apartment right before we moved. You can spy it in its original home in the background of these photos. The black locker-style IKEA cabinet was purchased in 2004, when Blake and I took Sarah and David to Balboa Island. This is the trip when Sarah got the worst sunburn I've ever seen on the back of her legs, but still trooped around IKEA with me the next day and then rode all the way back home with flat-packed furniture on the back car seat between us. The accent wall was painted that dark green when we moved in, and it's been bugging me for SEVEN YEARS.

After:

The rug that matches the one in the living room (they're two sizes of the IKEA GEDSER) was an awesome surprise Christmas gift from my parents last year. The updated chandelier is also from IKEA, and I blogged about installing it back in 2005. Blake and I bought the dining table and chairs in the summer of 2006, and he gave me the little table that holds cookbooks and Miss Petunia's tank for Christmas--possibly in 2007, since you can see evidence of its existence in these photos from 2008. The white cabinet that has doubled our kitchen-related storage capacity was a windfall from Blake's company when it was shut down last April. The painting of pomegranates in a bowl is one of the two Jamaica Trinnaman pieces I got for graduation in 2005, and you've seen it before surrounded by Christmas decorations. And...the roses are left over from a baby shower I hosted for a neighbor. I think that's it!