It seems like we’ve only been working in the yard or in the laundry room lately, but we’ve been making some progress in a few other rooms as well: the guest bedroom and dining room!

Remember those mirrors I made for my friend’s wedding in April?  I mentioned that my mom loved the rectangular one for our home and the bride asked if I wanted it when she was getting rid of wedding decor – the only catch was getting all the vinyl off of it. Done. I got the vinyl off using the weeder tool and we hung it above the shelf in the guest room!

I rearranged the decor on the shelf a little (trophy book end DIY), added some family photos and put water bottles and a spare key to our house for guests in a clear tray.  I also put our wedding book, aka boat oars that people signed, to the left of the shelf. I’ve never found a good place to hang them, but love having them out and reading the messages.

I still want to hang curtains in there, but haven’t found the right length for the room.  Ideally, I would just reuse my pom curtains from our old home‘s guest room, but I’ll need to shorten them.  Other than that, the room is basically done!

We also made more progress in the dining room! First, we took the 2 small doors between the kitchen and dining room out.  We always kept them open, so they were just collecting dust & cat hair behind them.

Wayfair was having a sale and we snagged a great rug & chandelier in late June.  We got the rug unrolled and in place just in time for our 4th of July party.  Cleo also loves it and we find her taking naps in there pretty frequently.

Then we hung the Morris Island lighthouse canvas that was previously in the guest room (before we hung the mirror) on the smaller wall by the doorway to the kitchen.

I also convinced Hunter to hang the new chandelier even though we’ll have to take it down to scrap the ceiling and re-hang it.  I just couldn’t have it sitting in a box tempting me like that though!

Next up: Finding chairs and a piece of furniture to store & display my family china.  Like I mentioned, we’ll also be scraping & painting the ceilings in here, replacing the chair rail, crown molding, and base boards and painting the walls.  Long term we’ll open the wall between the kitchen & dining up more, but we won’t do that until we renovate the kitchen.

Even with a long list in just this room, it was great to make progress and start to use the room!