hung up

Remember how I tried to publicly shame myself into finally hanging art up on our walls? I finally did it! Well, I finally did just the dining room.

I'm not sure why I find it so stressful (maybe it's our damned, crack prone, difficult to patch, plaster walls) but it took me forever, I changed my mind at least 12 times and I am still not sure I made the right decisions.

I love all the work, especially because almost all of it was made by friends and friends of friends, but I am just not sure I put it in the right places. Maybe I need to get used to it.

I love our dining room though, it might be my favorite room in the house. Probably because it's the only room I feel is "done" after 5 years of living here. (I have almost as much trouble deciding on furniture etc as I do where to put the art.)

The table was a hand me down from my parents. My dad used it as a desk for a few years, but it doesn't have the smoothest writing surface so when I got my first apartment my mom gave it to me. (I used it as a desk/sewing table- I didn't have a dining room!)

We got the chandelier in Italy and shipped it back. We were living in Florence for a few months at the time, but had just bought our house here before we left and I was obsessed. We went to Cortona early in our stay and went into a little flea market/antiques shop. When I saw the chandelier I decided I had to have it.

Steven thought I was crazy- never before had I expressed any interest in a cut crystal chandelier- or a cut crystal anything! He said that we should think about it and look around, "It's not the only chandelier in Italy, you know." So, over the next few months I dragged the poor man to every flea market in all of Italy, and some in France, looking at chandeliers (and other things) never finding one that came close to that one in Cortona.

Steven thought I had built the thing up in my head, that it couldn't have been nearly as nice as I thought it was, but we decided to go back to Cortona to see. And to have lunch, because in Cortona we had the best lunch EVER! I don't even remember what it was, just that truffles were involved and it was amazing. (note to self: plan trip to Cortona.) When we saw the chandelier again Steven admitted that it was the best chandelier in Italy (in our price range) and we bought it.

The cabinets we got in the Netherlands and shipped them back. They are steel wallpapered with Farrow and Ball paper.

The chairs were the first thing we got when, after moving every year for about 10 years, we finally settled down. I don't know why I was so anxious to get dining room chairs, at the time I wasn't sure we'd have a dining room for longer than a year or two. But something about them made me feel like a grown up and I had to have them.

The curtains we got on super duper clearance from Restoration Hardware because the color was discontinued. The walls are painted Farrow and Ball Light Blue #22 which looks blue, green, or gray depending on the time of day.

You all should come and dine with us sometime.