Show Us Your Life: Dining Room

This week's Show Us your Home is all about the Dining Room. There are lots of great dining rooms to check out at Kelly's Korner . You'll notice that there are no photos of our entire dining room. That's because right now, it's wearing a few hats. Reid is finishing up English and Geography projects, and I have 3 sewing machines set up at one end of the table. Maybe one day soon I'll have it all cleaned up and can post a picture. Maybe not.

This is our dining room chandelier. It is...big! But really it is perfectly sized for the room. When we bought this house, it had been fully restored, but I can't say that I would have done anything differently - the decor fits our furniture and style perfectly.

This beautiful tea set was brought back from Japan for me from my husband Chris. He was there on a trip with the USMC Drum and Bugle Corps. It was a rare commercial flight for them, and he packed the tea set very carefully in his luggage. Amazingly, it made it safely across all those miles. What I remember about that trip to Japan was that we got word while he was gone that the court procedures in India were over and Reid Mattison "Shyam" was officially our son. I was able to tell Chris when he was halfway around the world - closer to Reid than to me!



You can tell by this picture that we haven't finished decorating. I'm actually trying to find the best way to hang these pictures without damaging the paneled walls. The elephants were painted by an Indian artist - there are touches of India throughout our home, not surprising since three of our children were born there!


This is a very special painting, priceless to me. It was a wedding gift to my great-grandparents. When I was a child, it hung in our dining room and now it hangs in my family's dining room. The story goes that it originally had a very wide frame and when my grandmother inherited the frame, she decided that she didn't like it and had it cut down to the frame we have today. (as you can tell by the Halloween witch, my children have already decorated for the season!)

Here's the china cabinet. I still love the china I picked out - and I do mean 'I'. I waited a long time to get married and chose this china pattern when I graduated from college. I had some pieces and still loved the pattern when we were planning our wedding. Thankfully, Chris liked it, too. It's Randolph, by Noritake - now discontinued.

Here's the Daddy chair, at the head of the table (not to be sexist, the Mommy chair is at the other head of the table. Uh, closest to the kitchen.) Our table and chairs are from 2 different antique stores in Frederick, Maryland. We had spotted the chairs (8 of them, a rarity!) in the shop window before it opened. Then we found the table in another shop down the street. One shop kindly let us take the table leaf down the street to see if it matched the chairs. Little did we know that 2 other couples had spotted the same chairs and were following us down the sidewalk! Lucky for us, it was a perfect match and now it's all in our South Carolina dining room.


This picture shows a little of the wool rug, a little of the curtain, and a little of the window.