Everyone knows that we have made almost no progress on our house decorating to date; however, I have been downloading furniture and paint pictures and tearing things out of magazines for quite some time. This week we had a guy come by the house who makes custom furniture. My plan is to have him make us a Butler's Pantry for the dining room, so that we will finally have a place to put our wedding china and stacks of white dishes. I am going to have him replicate this design here (from Crowne Point), although the cabinets across the top will be flush and I will need to decide on a color for the beadboard backing (which will be wider than the beadboard shown here). He said that he could even get wavy antique glass for the upper panels. The plan is to match the wood on the serving surface with the color of our harvest dining table.
Additionally, we are planning on having him make a bar to match the hutch. It will slide up against the wall, but it will be built on rollers so that we can pull it out for entertaining. There will be drawers and also two doors on the front (to match the pantry). One door will open to vertical compartments for storing platters. Storage is key in our little old house! The other door will open to a single shelf that will subdivide the vertical space. We will also have doors on the back (with magnetic closures and no hardware), so that you can access the shelf side for storing liquor bottles or bar tools when entertaining. The top will also match the dining room table. I will let you guys know how this turns out. We probably will not have the new furniture until at least January.
We have been "discussing" (read arguing about) the paint color for the dining room. Right now the idea is to put flat paneled wainscoting around the perimeter of the dining room (see example picture from a baby's room above), and to paint the walls a pale blue or a pale green, with a similar, but slightly darker shade on the back paneling of the pantry. Here are two pictures that may help to illustrate.
