Christmas Home Tour 2016 {Part 2}

We continue our Christmas Home Tour in the dining room. If you have not already done so, check out my Christmas Home Tour {Part 1} where I share our entryway and living room. The dining room is right off of the living room and I love looking over and seeing the wreaths hanging in the windows, especially when there is snow falling. It is the perfect picture of Christmas bliss.

We have been in the process of updating our 1990’s house into this century, and this is one of the rooms that received an update. We added the board and batten on the walls which gave it so much more character. There is still not anything hanging on the walls yet, that is on our to do list that is a mile long. Lol.

I added some garland and ornaments to the chandelier, which is a fun and easy way to add Christmas decorations to any room.

I have to admit, this is my first tablescape, so it is very simple. We are usually pretty laid back in the dining department, we even eat off of paper plates a lot of the time (gasp). I don’t even own a lot of the things you need to decorate a pretty table but seeing all the beautiful tablescapes from other bloggers is inspiring me. However, I am sure as we go along, I will get better. 🙂

I absolutely love white pitchers so I knew that I wanted to incorporate them into the table centerpiece. Again I used some branches off of our old Christmas tree and stuck them into the pitchers. Pretty easy way to dress up the center of the table. A couple of these pitchers are actual Ironstone and have some discoloration and chips, but I think that adds to the charm of them.

I made the table runner from a drop cloth (of course, what else?) and painted the grain sack stripes down the center. I have a easy trick to painting the straight lines which is in the tutorial. It is the same way I painted my curtains! Yes I actually painted the stripes on my curtains. 🙂 I still think I will wash the table runner to give it a softer look to the stripes but for this it worked great.

Kitchen

The kitchen and family room are off of the dining room. This is another place that has received a lot of updating, but there is still more to do. Actually I think that list is never ending. 🙂 I will be sharing all of our home improvements on the blog in the future so stay tuned for those. We painted our cupboards white in here and it has made such a difference in lightening up the kitchen.

We added garland and ornaments above the cabinets which may not seem like a big deal to you, but I love it because we would never have been able to do that before. There used to be a soffit above the cabinets which we removed and then built up the cabinets. If you can take out your soffits, DO IT! That made a huge difference in opening up our kitchen.

On the counters I wanted to go light and simple with the decorations. I love the simplicity of the olive bucket with the evergreen branches in it.

I made a cute vignette out of an antique cream can, crate and lantern lit up with some battery operated lights. We painted the cream can modeled after an old advertisement we found.

This DIY tobacco basket is a project that I recently shared. It looks great out here with a boxwood wreath hanging on it.

The cloth ribbon is the other project I made from the 2 Target dollar spot table runners. Click here to get that tutorial. It fits in perfect for Christmas. It also has a Farmhouse feel to it that you can use all year round.

Family Room

The decorating in the family room is more fun. This is where the kids hang out most of the time and they got to decorate this tree. They wanted to do colored lights, but I love the look of white lights so we compromised and put both on there. As much as I did not want to, I have to admit, the colored lights do look beautiful all lit up at night.

All the ornaments are from many years of receiving them from my mom and stepdad. Every year they buy an ornament for us and the kids based on something we have done throughout that year. It is a great tradition and one that we will continue on with our boys someday. I love the fact that they will have these ornaments when they start their own families.

Isn’t this vintage Christmas tree great? We got it passed down to us from Mr. Wonderful’s grandmother. Whose grandma didn’t have one of these? Lol. I know mine did too, that is why I love it so much. Unfortunately the little light bulbs for it got lost somewhere along the way. Our solution? Light bright pegs. Ha! They fit pretty well in the holes and light up great when we put a strand of LED lights inside the tree.