Dining Room Redo Manufactured Home

 A Plain Jane Room

The Dining Room

Our home was a foreclosed property when we bought it and pretty much everything had been painted white.  I'm not sure if that's the way the previous owners had it or if the bank had hired someone to come in a paint it.. It didn't look like anyone had ever tried to put any personality into the poor thing.. It was truly just a blank slate to work with, which was like a play ground for me.  We really were lucky, though, that there was no structural damage, it had been set on a really good foundation with a deep crawl space, and no window's had been broken, it hadn't been broken into, etc.. It had sat empty for a couple of years!

The dining room and livingroom flow together with the den to the right and the kitchen to the left.. This room had one window and one pitiful chandelier and that was about it. 

I pulled off, and marked, all the crown molding, ripped off the little strips between the drywall sheets and mudded the seams, then painted the top half of the walls with a straw colored paint. I then added tongue and groove wainscoting on both walls.. 

We used to collect roosters, so I added rooster wallpaper border and a country chandelier I found at Home Depot.. Bye bye pitiful chandelier. 

I also added new window sills, which looked so much nicer than the original thin window sills, and put the crown molding back up.

I used a Waverly home decor fabric for the curtains lined in a Waverly rooster fabric with rooster metal curtain tie backs.. 

This room, however, has gone through many changes over the last 9 1/2 years.. 

We eventually added a large sunroom on the backside of the house, and John turned this window into a doorway..

Before we laid the new floor, I decided it was time to say goodbye to the roosters and redecorate the dining room.. I painted the walls white and found a new border full of flowers and an old fashioned red bike.. We both really liked the results, but we ended up changing it again in no time at all!

In the winter of 2014, our sunroom collapsed one bitter cold night, making a huge mess and turning us into stressed out homeowners.. We ended up having a family room built in it's place.. The window John had turned into a doorway was ripped out and a standard sized door was put in it's place, which is great, but the door wasn't as wide as the opening, so we had to figure out what to do with the foot gap and how to pull everything together.. I didn't have any more of the border, or any left over paint, so once again, I decided to redo the dining room. 

First, we had to figure out what to do about that gap.. 

We were both under the impression that the carpenters would be fixing this.. We kept waiting for them to work on it, but when they were done working on the room and packing up to leave, John asked them about the doorway.. He was told, 

"sorry, that wasn't included in the estimate.. "

Oh boy!

John came up with the idea of adding tongue and groove wood to match the wainscoting. That seemed like a great solution, but we really weren't sure how to do this so it would look like it'd always been there.. 

Being DIY'ers and not professionals, this wasn't as easy to figure out as you might think.. The  window gap was not level with the wall...The wooden wainscoting was a little thicker than the drywall..The door frame was not even with either.. We thought about this for days... I have no idea  how I figured this one out, but I got up one morning and knew what to do..I tried to explain it to John (in woman's carpentry terms. lol), but he wasn't really getting what I was suggesting.. I made a deal with him that I'd fix this doorway if he'd do the insulation in the new family room.. He said "DEAL"... He thought he was getting the better end of the deal, but I think I did, because once I gotten started on it, it went together quickly. I can't even explain how I did it, I just kind of figured it out as I went and made necessary adjustments as needed.. Somehow, the whole thing came together. I stained it the same as the wainscoting and was pretty darn pleased with myself. 

There was a furnace register right in front of the doorway.. We don't actually use our furnace anymore, as we now have a pellet stove, which heats the house really well, but we didn't want to just cover the vent completely. I found a decorative metal grate on Amazon that fit perfectly,it is very sturdy, and honestly, now that it's been like this for almost a year, we don't even notice it. 

One thing we learned from this.. I originally ordered the register cover using the measurements I needed to completely cover the opening and then about an inch extra on all sides. But when ordering these grates, the size they give you is for the part that slides down into the opening, so I had actually ordered one that was way too large and wouldn't fit. Once I realized that, I ordered the size of the opening, and the grate turned out to fit perfectly. 

By time I'd finished the tongue and groove insert and the trim around the doorway, I probably could have just left the dining room like it was by just touching up a few spots on the painted part, but I thought, what the heck.. I've been wanting to wallpaper those walls anyways.. 

You may be saying, what is with this woman? So much red and gingham.. Well, what can I say?  I have always loved gingham, especially in dark reds, and I love lacey things and rose's.. 

I found a roll of gingham and cream wallpaper on ebay that matched the fabric I used for the curtains in the living room perfectly!

I bought chair covers to match the furniture slipcovers and had enough of the curtain fabric left over to make a tablecloth to use along with a cream table cloth and lace topper.. 

I bought the wallpaper border from someone on ebay, too.. it's a discontinued Waverly pattern and I could only get one roll of it.. It JUST fit. 

I love precious moments and have a curio cabinet full of

them. All of my kids have given me a number of them, but especially my oldest son.. 

My grandpa made this little table many, many moons ago. There used to be two of them, but I don't know what happened to the other half. 
I've hung on to it for years..This seemed like a nice little place to stick it and cover it with a pretty doily John's sister crocheted for us. 

John used to surprise me with these little porcelain music boxes when we were dating and after we were married.  The shelf is one John has had for years and years. I painted it country white and scruffed it up a bit to keep it looking old. 

I love snow, and that goes for snowmen, too!

This set of cabinets open from both the kitchen side and dining room side.
I was never a big fan of the etched glass in the cabinet doors, so when I did the
2nd redo, I took the glass inserts out and replaced them with lace curtains.

For some reason, the cats suddenly decided this counter top

was a cat super freeway, and they kept jumping up on the ledge 

running the length of the counter top, so I made a little birdhouse

fence to stop them..

Tomi, our oldest cat, actually squeezed between the fence posts a couple of times, but before long, he gave up. 

I'm going to start tiling the kitchen countertops soon, and I'm hoping once I take the fence down, the cats will have forgotten about the freeway and I won't have to put it back up. 

There's so many ways you could decorate the dining room in a manufactured home, depending on your own personal style!  There's so many shows on TV now that show how to completely remodel a home by tearing everything out and starting over again.. That's fine, if that's what you want to do. But you can also change a room completely with just paint, wallpaper and decorations.
The only limit is your imagination..