We’ve been doing a lot of renovation preparation around the house. What that means is we decided to redo the floors in our living room And, once we started looking at floors, expanded it to a short hallway and then the dining room. And while we had repainted the living room and hallway when we moved in last year, we had done nothing with the dining room. (Well, aside from buying a really funky dining room set with pumpkin orange leather chairs.)

So … that meant we should redo the dining room before the floors went in. We pulled off the top layer of painted-over wallpaper. Then the second layer of painted-over wallpaper. We gave up on getting the third layer of painted-over wallpaper off and just put two layers of primer, followed by two layers of Venetian plaster and a topcoat. 

And that was just above the chair rail. Really.

Below, two layers of tinted primer went over the burgundy paint, followed by three layers of federal blue. (Hey, can you tell there are two Syracuse University alumni in the house?) 

That left the chair rail and trim, which I was informed I wasn’t allowed to touch. Seems I can’t paint a straight line … the wife takes this stuff very seriously.

Canon EOS 5D, EF 50 mm f/1.4 USM, ISO 400, 1/60, f/1.4

Canon G9, 7 mm, ISO 200, 1/10, f/2.8

Canon G9, 15 mm, ISO 200, 1/4, f/3.2