Dining room done!

We moved into our house here in Vegas ten years ago. One reason that we purchased a house instead of renting is that we like to change things. Not sure exactly why, but it is difficult to leave things as is.

Since we moved in we made major changes to the yard, the biggest was removing about 20,000 square feet (1900 square meters) of grass and converting the area to desert type landscaping, with low water requirement trees, shrubs and ground cover. Since the major change we’ve swapped some trees and bushes and put in more things. Many plants don’t do well here because of the poor alkaline soil, and others don’t like the below freezing winters. Most plants can take our heat as long as they get enough water. A number of smaller plants get frozen out each winter and are replaced with hardier ones. One really cold winter caused a few young trees to die.

Inside we have also done a lot of changes. Our house was built in the late 60’s and some things have worn out, other things required updating. We’ve replaced a number of the single pane windows with dual pane energy efficient ones, replaced the big tank water heater with a tankless, installed gas (the house used to be all electric) to drive the water heater and cooktop.

Most recently we’ve been working on the kitchen, moving a wall, replacing cabinets and appliances and lighting and flooring. There used to be a door from the kitchen directly into the dining room in addition to an opening from the kitchen to the family room. We closed in the door to the dining room which resulted in more wall space for cabinets as well as a longer end wall in the dining room. This allowed us to install some nice cabinets on the dining room wall, resulting in this:


The dining area isn't a separate room, it's the end of our front room. The mirror, lights, cabinet and table are all from Ikea. B did the big painting. We still have to get a new rug for under the table, can’t find exactly what fits somebody’s image. I installed the small spot lights on the wall, tiny fluorescents. Over to the right is the family room, future step is to pull up the carpet and install the wood flooring like the front room.

Waiting on the countertops for the kitchen (ordered but slabs not here yet), we finally picked out the flooring (a natural cork floating floor). After the counters go in we have some backsplash tile to put up, then the flooring goes down, trim put in and we’re done! I’ve been using the new ovens, and so nice to have a big gas cooktop. Photos of that to come when we’re done.