Wallpaper:

Before we even started working on this room, I had already chosen the wallpaper. I had fallen in love with the Jubileum Flora wallpaper in White by Borastapeter the moment I saw it. Heavily patterned but with that crisp Scandinavian feel, it looked vibrant and fresh to me without being overly chaotic.

I specifically wanted to choose a pattern that was slightly out of my comfort zone, something that I hadn't seen anywhere else and that presented the modern take on traditional I love so much. The pattern is bold, but paired with wainscotting and crown moulding, I don't think it will be too much for this small dining room.

Moulding:

I apologize for the poor photo quality (I forgot my good camera at the cottage, oof!) but wanted to show you the great progress we made over the last two weekends. All of the wall moulding was finally installed. We used the same moulding that we used in our living room. It's from one of my project sponsors and long-time brand partners, Metrie, and is mostly from their Very Square Scene II collection. I love the high baseboards and the significant profile of the panel moulding.

The moulding was installed right over 1/8" hardboard. We used hardboard as we had removed the original moulding in this room and it left the bottom half of the walls very patchy with lots of glue residue. Instead of patching all the holes, a quicker and easier solution was to install hardboard right over the drywall. With the moulding chair rail, and once everything is painted all one colour, you won't even notice it's there.

Chairs:

Another bit of progress was made with the dining room chairs. My dining set is about 15 years old and I debated whether to get a new set, get just new chairs, or recover the old chairs. In the end, I hate wastefulness, especially when it comes to useful pieces of furniture, so had the chairs recovered by my friend Lindsey (she also reupholstered the fabulous blue chairs in our living room!).

Choosing the fabric for the chairs was a tough choice. My friends at Fabricut sent me over some fantastic samples like this, this, this and this, but in the end I went a mix of Boule Lake on the back and Zuma Delft on the front and seat. I'm especially pleased with the Zuma Delft which is a Fibreguard Resistance Texture which means it's hard-wearing and resistant to stains, a must for the dining room!

Paint:

The paint colour was another hotly debated issue in our house. I had narrowed the options down to Benjamin Moore's Paper White, a sophisticated slightly grey off-white, and Simply White, a versatile pure white. As you can see, we went with Simply White on the wainscot and door and window trim. Ignore the yellowish paint above the wainscot - we only put a primer coat there as it will be covered with wallpaper. One side effect of this newly painted white and bright room is that it makes the "white" paint in the hallway look decidedly creamy. But not to fear, I have another (months-long???) project to fix that, ha!

And so things sit. I LOVE this view into the room and can't wait to get the wallpaper up. Now to decide on a few other very important things... what colour do you think the rug should be? Light or dark? And the chandelier... something very modern, yes? To juxtapose with the traditional moulding and wallpaper? And I need curtains too. And a sideboard. And art.

Oh dear, I guess we really have progressed that far on this project at all, ha! Patience required ;)