Dining Room Makeover: The Before

We bought a new home about 6 months ago. I’ve slowly been working on making it ours. Over the past 6 months we have done quite a few repairs and we have decorated some rooms but not others. Let’s be honest, the boys’ rooms were the first ones done because I wanted them to feel at home.

One room that is completely undone is the dining room. We ordered our dream table back in June and it’s being made for us so we are still waiting on that but we have been told it should be done soon so I want to get some work done in the dining room before it comes so that I’m not working around it.

Here is where the dining room stands:

Basically all I have done in there is to take down the heavy drapes they had at the window and paint a few paint samples on the wall. None of which I think I am going with. Oh, and I assembled some of the dining room chairs. Those are I believe the Bergmund chairs from Ikea but they were on clearance when we got them and I think that the color of these covers is no longer made. Some of the chair covers are a bit more wrinkled so I need to hit them up with my steamer to get them to lay a bit more nicely. These chairs are for the sides of the dining room table, I need to figure out what to do for end chairs still.

The color of paint you see from the playroom (where this before picture was taken) is reading more blue in this photo but it’s more grey in real life. It’s Classic Silver from Behr. For the dining room I am undecided on what paint color I want to do.

I do know that I want to do white below the chair rail and make diy a sort of board and batten treatment at the bottom. Then above the chair rail I want to do a color, but I haven’t decided exactly what. My initial thoughts were a light blue-green but I tried a couple and don’t like them. I also thought about doing a fun wallpaper like this floral one. However, I am honestly a little intimidated by doing that much wallpaper even if it is peel and stick so I think for now I am just going to paint that upper portion and then do a fun, bold curtain.

So back to the color dilemma I was thinking navy. My only fear is that it will make the room too dark. Here is a very terrible photoshop rendering of what the room would look like:

Obviously the for the bottom portion the board and batten and all the trim would be the same white I just wanted to get a very rough visual to see if it was making sense in my head.

I also wonder if having a darker brown table (our table will look something like this) with a darker paint color will be too much darkness. I don’t want to do grey because I have gray in the rest of the downstairs since all the spaces are very open to each other but I want the dining room to be a little special. We have never had a separate dining room and I’m excited to have one. Having the bottom half of the room being white does give a little leeway with having a darker color on top but I kind of need to try it I think to see how I feel.

As for the other elements in the room I would love to do a sparkly light fixture like this one or a wooden beaded one like this one.

For the window I plan to sew some curtains from a fun fabric. I don’t have a specific plan for this yet, I think it take some browsing in the fabric stores to figure out what I want. And then of course I still have to figure out what kind of chairs I want to have at each end of the table. I always have to sit in chairs before deciding on them so I’ll have to do that shopping in person.

I have a mirror that I want to hang in the room but outside of that I am going to wait to decide on any other elements of the room until I have pulled together some of the basics like the paint and getting the table in there. I’m a very visual person so while I like making a plan I have to physically see things in place to know how I like them and that really helps me figure out what direction to go in.

I am hoping to work on the room soon so I will share progress as I work on it with you all! Let me know if you have any suggestions as I would love to hear them!