My Dining Room Style

Hello Friends!! First off I just have to say THANK YOU so much for all of your kind words and support in regards to my last post!! To be able to share such exciting news with all of you, and be vulnerable with my dreams, and have them received so warmly means more than I can ever say! Last week I shared about how it’s ok if you don’t have your dream house, and why I think that makes you a better decorator, and where to even start with the decor in your own home. So today I’m going to share with you how my dining room style evolved into the space you see today!

Knowing where to start can be tricky, I get it. There are so many things to consider. What furniture you are incorporating into the space, and then what accessories you want to add to the space after. Painting a room is one of the easiest (and cheapest!) ways to transform a space, but sometimes people have a hard time picking a paint color. For me, I always pick based off of what mood I want the room to evoke. Do I want it to feel like and airy, or dark and moody, or somewhere in between. And trust my, I will repaint a room many times until I have just the right shade, I’m totally guilty of that :p

Our dining room was a tricky space for me because it wasn’t my favorite. Remember in my post about knowing where to start in your decor I shared to pick the easiest room first – well our dining room was NOT the easiest room. You may think that because how hard could it really be? You have a dining room table, and some chairs, and you only use the room maybe 1/4 of the time. But something just didn’t feel right.

At the time when we moved into our first home, I was really starting to discover my own decor style, and most of the pieces I had didn’t go with that style. Which let me just point out real quick. Your style will evolve, so don’t be afraid to evolve with it. I know my own style was always with me, I just hadn’t fully discovered it yet, or knew quite how to execute it. So here is what we started with :

And here’s the space today :

Of course you know it I didn’t get that Before & After over night. Nope, if you’ve been following the blog for awhile, maybe even pre-2015, then you know our dining room has transformed into the space you see today. So let me show you some highlights on how we got here.

I mentioned we started off with some hand-me-down furniture. Our dining room table, and buffet to be exact. So one of the first things I did to help our dining room style evolve was I painted our hand-me-down table black, and swapped out the matching end chairs that came with the set, with two wicker chairs from IKEA. I blogged about it HERE, just in case you want to go back to some really early days, lol, but you can see the progress in the photo below.

This is also where I started incorporating some white accessories to lighten up the space. We couldn’t afford a new dining room table, so after seeing some tutorials on how to build a farmhouse table, one February snow storm my husband decided to give it a try. And we built the table you see below :

It was a dream come true! I blogged about it HERE, and since we built it I was able to paint it and create the custom finish you see. We also added a chair rail molding to the dining room, and painted the bottom portion of the wall white, and it stayed like this for quite a while. This finally felt like me. Finally felt more like my style. A dining room can tend to look more formal by nature, so I love to make it feel more relaxed by piecing together my furniture instead of using a matching dining room set.

I refinished my inherited dresser turned buffet, and took down the black framed mirror. Slowly but surely I replaced all the “black” accent pieces that once filled the room. Then to continue lightening up the space we removed the chair rail we originally installed, and added a board and batten treatment to 3/4 of the walls, and the space finally felt finished!

We installed a chandelier that felt much more “farmhouse” to me, and over the last couple years brought in new furniture. I shared about it HERE, we’ve been in our house for 8 years, EIGHT! And as much as I love it, the designer in me was craving a change.

I debated for over a year about painting over the original gray color on the top portion of our dining room walls, because well, it was the first color I had painted in our home, and honestly I loved it. But there’s one thing I know about paint – it’s just paint. And if you know me at all, then you know I will paint a room on whim, and possibly paint it again just because.

I’ve added rugs, taken them away, swapped out decor. Hung things on the wall, taken them down, and changed things up seasonally, but the bones in this space have stayed the same, and I love it. I was about to say it’s one of my favorite rooms, and while that’s partially true, I think it’s more that I absolutely love everything in this space, and that’s what makes it a favorite.