Battle of the Dining Room: Round 1

At the risk of boring my gentle readers with home DIY posts, I'm actually sort of excited about my dining room at the moment. Over a year ago, you might recall I had a major plumbing backup which demanded that my septic line be dug up and re-laid; it also meant that I finally ripped out the crappy nasty wall to wall carpet in the downstairs. But, things being as they are, I didn't have the time or the ability to do anything else about the situation until this Spring, when I decided to repaint the walls and look at new floor options.

Nothing like deciding to start a project to make the whole thing infinitely more complicated. I found out first that my concrete floor is not flat. Second, that the tiny crack in the wall, which I thought I could just scrape and spackle, was actually the harbinger of massive plaster damage. I scraped, and scraped some more, and then suddenly i was looking at a glimmer of daylight through the hole in my wall. Caulk fixed the crack where the water had been seeping in, but the interior damage was daunting, and I've spent the last 2 months trying to figure out how to fix it myself. The answer, of course, is that the way to fix it is look up "Plasterers" on Angie's List, and have a professional do it. That's finally happening later this week. The floor, on the other hand, is doable; my father and I spent a couple hours this morning learning the joys of self-leveling cement compound, and tomorrow I'll be sanding off all the lumps left by our inadequate mixing skillz. I'm actually pretty excited at the prospect of having a functional dining room in the next month-due to the nasty carpet, it's never been a room I wanted to spend much time in even when I first moved in. So you may be subjected to occasional Dining Room Diary entries in the coming weeks, just because it's so damn cool to finally get something done! You have been warned....