To backtrack a little bit, that deal-sealing trip wasn't our first house hunting effort. Before that, I was searching on mls.ca (the now realtor.ca) and various builder sites, but none jumped out. I guess we did reach that tipping point when I stepped into that sales centre. Upon a quick scan, none of the models caught my eye. It must be the holiday spirit or just our luck, the sales rep Louise was extremely nice and asked what we were looking for in a new house. My first thought was...not a cookie cutter. But that's a tall order, isn't it, cookie cutter sort of comes with the territory for any new construction these days. Louise paused, turned back to his office, and brought with him a floor plan that had me always gasp in joy! It had 90% of the features from my wish list, the reason why it was in the back office was because this builder only built this model as lottery grand prize show homes! I guess someone really wanted to wrap up a quick sale before Christmas, eh?
Well, one of the downside of buying from a floor plan is that all the locations and lengths of entryways and walls are approximate. Just lookie this odd wall opening between our living room and dining room in the picture below -- I could never tell from a blueprint!
July 2009: we had a tough time with the odd layout of this supposedly dining room. If I put a long seating at the wall shown below, I wouldn't have enough room for a 8-person dining table. If the sideboard went there, then the table and the chairs would have blocked the view. Anyhow, this was what we moved into, a pretty awkward dining space that doesn't lead directly into kitchen.
Dec 2009: our
dining set was delivered by Anne-Quinn Furniture just in time for the Christmas
Eve dinner party. As you could tell, nothing much had been done in this
room...thankfully the food and wine was good. :-)
March 2010: I must have been in over my head that I took up a not-so-novice DIY half-wall wainscoting challenge. You can read more about how it came together here. We also painted the wall in Behr Stable Hay...I shouldn't have known better from the name of the paint color that it was going to turn out very golden/yellow. Hated the wall color and must get rid of it. The 9-frame gallery wall was yet again a failed attempt to decorate that 2/3 wall.
April 2010: our sideboard arrived. Other than the wall color, it looked pretty good from this angle, IMO.
November 2010: I finally made time to re-paint the walls in Benjamin Moore's Revere Pewter. It new color goes better with dark dining set, white wainscoting and blue silk drapes, don't you think? And I am happy to report that so far I haven't changed my mind yet on what we've done to the room.
