Hello, friends!
Today, I am so excited to have one of my new blog friends guest posting for me today. Susan and I met for this first time this past February, and I fell in love with her heart and her genuine spirit.
She is super talented and has a wonderful blog that I hope you check out and start following! You are going to love her post today. 
Thank you, Susan, for being here!
Hi there! I’m Susan from Living Rich on Less, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to guest post for Traci today. I met Traci at Blissdom this year and, let me tell you, she is just as sweet and genuine in real life as she is on her blog. I’m truly blessed to know her. Today I am going to show you all what I have been up to in my dining room and I am also going to include a quick tutorial on how to cut decorative molding.
I got the inspiration for my dining room wall color (Behr’s Cinnabar) and some of the accessories from Sarah over at Thrifty Decor Chick. Of course, almost everything I buy is very budget-friendly.
In an effort to break up the dark walls and dark furniture in this space, I decided to add chair rail molding and finish it off with picture frame, box molding. I began by painting the lower portion of my dining room walls with the exact trim color used throughout our house. This made it a breeze to paint around baseboards and window casings.
After that, I primed and painted four 12-foot sections of chair rail molding, which I purchased at 84 Lumber. (I’ve found molding is often much cheaper at lumber yards than at home improvement stores.)
Next, I got my dad – a lifelong carpenter and handyman – to help me cut the molding so it fit perfectly into all the corners (no buckets of caulk or putty needed).
Check out our video on how to do this the RIGHT way:
Here’s another tip: if your molding is not long enough to stretch across the room, you can easily splice two pieces together. Cut them at an angle and the seam will be more inconspicuous. (We cut ours at a 45-degree angle). This is our splice without any filler or paint: 
Once I fill and paint this seam, it will virtually disappear! My next step is to cut and install the picture frame molding, which I’m hoping will turn out something like this:
Oh! I will also need to make curtains for the room. So far, I’ve had no luck finding fabric I like. Here is what our dining room looked like when we bought our home:
And here’s what it looks like today:
To keep up with the progress in our dining room and all the other crazy projects we have going on around our place,
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Traci, thanks so much for letting me stop by. God bless you and your family.
