My Dining Room is Finished!!

It is finished!!  I am thrilled to share with you our newly re-designed dining room!  It took us about 2 months to get everything put together, but it is so worth the wait!

Before we get started, here is the before picture (it is so painful for me to look at!)

WOW – what an improvement!  We have lived in this house for four years, the dining room looked like this for a year.

Then we turned it into a playroom for the kids.  We were so busy that we didn’t have time to have people over for dinner anymore 🙁  We have a small table in our kitchen so we have been using that for meals.

Now that Mark is working from home we have time again!  We really LOVE entertaining and having people over for dinner, so we decided to turn the room back into a dining room and move our kids toys into a back room. You can see how I designed their new toy room using Dollar Tree items here.

First, we started with the back wall, by painting over the wood paneling.  Just doing that alone brightened up the room a lot!

We used Valpar paint from Lowe’s in two different colors.  The paint color for the wood paneling and one of the walls is ‘Cincinnatian Hotel Hannaford‘ is and the color of the walls is ‘Frankincense’.

We painted our old wooden table, the table that I grew up eating on.  It has special meaning to me and when Mark was painting it, he found little engravings from where my brother used to sit.  He passed away 9 years ago, so this was such a sweet little wink from heaven for us!

I am working on a post about how we painted our table and chairs, so stay tuned for that.  We used the same paint color as the paneling, but applied 2 coats of semi-gloss polyurethane to make the table durable enough to withstand our family!

I found these frames at a thrift store for $0.75 each!  The pictures I had printed at Walmart.  The ‘Family’ icon was from WiseDecor.com.

The curtains were where we spent the most amount of money.  I could have made them myself, but couldn’t find a fabric that I loved that would have been less money than what I spent on these.  We purchase them online at Target.com.  They do carry these curtains in the store, but they do not carry the 96″ long ones so we had to buy them online.  They cost $29.99 per panel which was more than half our budget for this room.  Mark and I are what you call ‘curtain snobs’, many of our arguments in our 12 years of marriage have been over curtain rods or curtains.  (I wish I was joking, but I am not!)

The carpet was from Mohawkflooring.com. I found the color inspiration for this room from this rug. You can read more about how I did that here.

This dresser is my favorite piece of furniture in my home!  I love it so much I want to hug it every morning! I bought it for $30.00 at a thrift store, then used milk paint to refinish it.  You can see the detailed step by step about how I used milk paint to refinish this.  We also used the same milk paint on two of our chairs.

My favorite part of the room was my custom wall decal!  I got it from WiseDecor.com, where you can customize your wall art.  I chose what size, color, and what it said.  I chose one of my favorite bible verses, one that I pray over my family.  I love that is takes up that entire space on the wall that I previously had no idea what to do with.

I finished out the room with this custom canvas wall art.  I spent around $50.00 to create these.  The 3 fabric canvas were wrapped in the curtain fabric. I purchased 5 curtains, 4 for the windows and an extra one to wrap the canvas in and make a table runner.  You can see a step by step tutorial on how I made them here.

Here is the breakdown of cost for this room:

What we already had and repurposed:

• Table
• Chairs
• Curtain rods
• Chandelier
• Decorations on dresser
• Primer for paneling

What we bought:

• Wall decorations – $57.00
• Paint for walls –  $70.00
• Dresser – $100.00
• Curtains – $150.00
• Chair Rail – $40.00
• Paint for table and chairs – $27.00
• Painting materials – $20.00

The total cost of this redesign was $464 + tax!

I am SO excited about this AND for how little money we used.  Our budget was $500, so we came in under budget – YAY!

What is your favorite part of the room?

Disclosure: The area rug was provided by Mohawkflooring.com and the Wall Decal was provided by WiseDecor.com.  I love them both and think that they complete the room and am so thankful for the generosity by both companies!