Makeover Madness…the Dining Room

allie • Jan 28, 2011

And the journey continues….into the dining room.The dining room was a place where we did have to splurge a bit on purchasing a table and chairs. There was only an eat-in kitchen in the birdhouse and therefore no need for a formal dining table. We looked around quite a bit, and by we I mean Me, and this is what we (me) came up with. I love the farm house feel of this dining table and liked the contrast of the black chairs. We purchased it from JCPenny’s for $750 but with shipping came close to $1000, not that bad if you have ever looked for dining furniture! It came with a leaf as well which was key for us. If you have the time to look around a bit, I just found an amazing Pottery Barn table and chairs with leaf for $350 on Craigslist (my other best friend), but you have to be willing to act fast and pay that day!

So now for the before pictures to break down what we really did to this room!

We only have one picture of the before but as you can see the dining room was carpeted, oak wood work again, and a glass chandelier. Also dark drapes closed the space in.

After…

We continued the word floors throughout, painted all the trim white, updated the lighting, and added new drapes. (If you click on the picture you can see the whole thing, not sure why it got hidden behind my sidebar??? Still a newbie:)

Another important thing that we did was add this woodwork detail between the dining room and the living room. The reason why this was so important for me is because it allowed me to paint my dining room a different color than my living room. Before we did this there was no break on this wall to separate the two rooms. It only cost about $30 in material and Ryan and his dad were able to put it in.

The centerpiece is also important on your table, something to make the room pop. I love to use apothecary’s because you can change out the fillers for the seasons or your mood. I also just took some left over fabric that I had and ripped it to make a runner down the center of my table. An inexpensive fix to mix it up a bit!

I was also going to mention that this brown is actually new to me, I just painted it a couple of weeks ago.  Before that it looked like this…

Notice the difference from cool to warm?? I still like the blue but think I might incorporate it more into my living room…someday!

So, here’s the breakdown for this room and what we did:

Wood Floors: About $200 for this room

Area Rug:  $100 at Ikea

Drapes and Rods:  $120 at Ikea

Chandelier:  $125

Corner Hutch: $35

Go Between Trim: $35

Paint:  $25

Table and Chairs:  $1000 (ouch, that ups the budget!)

Grand Total:  $1640.00

Here’s the deal, some of the most inexpensive ways to transform your room are to change out the lighting, which is relatively cheap, and quite easy to do on your own (Sidenote:  I also want to say with chandeliers a lot of people hang them high, my lighting expert sister told me that ours was acutally a couple inches high, whoops, so make sure you keep it a little lower.  They suggest 32″-36″ over a table or 60″-72″ from the ground)…ALSO, add some sort of drape or curtain.  It really warms up the room and changes the look, for a very small price.  Again, this was not done all at once.  We ate at a card table for quite some time, but little by little things came together.  Is it done??  No, probably not.  I’m sure there is some garage sale buy or thrift store find that could grace itself as a buffet on one of the walls, but that’s what I got until now, until another treasure appears:)

Next week is the living room:)

This piece my father-in-law actually found me at a garage sale for $35!! He was so proud because it was white and he knew I was spraying everything white… little did he know though that I was going to change it to black:) I would love to add some trim and molding to this piece to bring more character to it, but until I can talk my husband into doing it, or learn to do it myself–it will stay like this:)

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