Woman in Real Life

Thankfully this past weekend was a 4-day weekend for us, without any activities to shuttle kids to. We did dog-sit a large puppy and attend two Easter dinner parties, but there was at least some free time to work on our dining room makeover for the One Room Challenge.

That's a good thing, because we are at week 3 (out of 6) already! Seeing as week 6 is the reveal, we have three weeks left to go. Where are we at with it? By last week, most of what was accomplished was painting. From there, we planned to move onto wallpaper, picking a paint colour for the secondhand china cabinet and installing some of the mouldings.


One out of three ain't bad, right? We didn't get to the wallpaper and we haven't picked a colour for the china cabinet, but my husband did install quite a bit of trim. He installed the beautiful Metrie French Curves Scene II casing and decorative Ikons/rosettes around the window and the large open doorway to the hall, as you can see in the top photo. (You can also see my office across the hall, overflowing with items waiting to be added to the dining room for week 6. And on a completely irrelevant note, I really should get rid of the lantern and pine cones on top of the armoire now!)


Last week I said we were going to prime and paint all of the mouldings before installing them. That was true for the most part, but my husband wanted to get the baseboards put in and we didn't have those all primed and painted. No biggie. We'll prime and paint them this week. We chose poplar baseboards because I like natural finishings when possible. They are also durable and beautiful. You can even stain Metrie's natural poplar mouldings rather than painting them, for some really cool effects - maybe in your country home?

Tools You Need To Install Trim

When we overhauled our foyer recently, it was our first time installing a significant amount of trim. We're talking baseboards, chair rail, panel moulding, crown moulding and casing. Quite frankly I had no idea what tools we would need to install all of the trim. Hammer and nails maybe? Haha. While you could use a hammer and nails for some of the trim installation, it's a bit more complicated than that. Ideally you want to make your life much easier by having the right tools for the job. Fortunately we are well-equipped with tools for our dining room makeover.


To install trim efficiently and effectively, you need tools that have the power to work quickly, without splitting your trim. One necessity is a brad nailer, like our RYOBI ONE+ 18-gauge cordless brad nailer. (It drives 5/8" to 2" brad nails.) A brad nailer is ideal for thin trim, like chair rail. For trim that's thicker, like our Metrie French Curves crown moulding, you want a 16-gauge finish nailer, which shoots fatter, longer nails. (That crown moulding is beautiful because it's so thick!) We have RYOBI's ONE+ 16-gauge cordless straight finish nailer.