Dining Room Reveal

First my hair... and now this!

Sheesh! For a girl who's not big on change,

I'm sure doing a lot of drastic things lately.

This project has been so fun and now the dining room is one of my favorite rooms in the house!

It is basically the center of our home - the room we walk through to get to most all other rooms - and it has always been my favorite room to decorate seasonally.

So now every time I walk in, it makes me smile.

Do you love before & after pics like I do?

Okay then!

Drum roll please...

Bye bye red! Hello blue-gray... with chestnut and black accents. :)

(I'm still playing around with the decor.)

Before

After
Before

After

More After's

You can see above that we haven't purchased drapes yet and I think that will change the look of the room in a huge way.

I'm interested in doing a black or dark bronze rod hung about 2/3 of the way from the top of the window trim to the ceiling. I like sphere or square finials for the ends of the rod and a chestnut-colored linen drape to the floor. I found exactly the look I had in mind here at Pottery Barn and also got the idea there for doing pussy willow in a pitcher/vase/urn on top of the wine rack.
I've requested a swatch of the chestnut fabric from PB but we definitely don't plan to order hardware from them - too expensive. We'll see about the drapes - they are on sale...

But right now I think leaving it bare is better than this:

One big first step that Craig worked on was sanding off all the "popcorn" from the molding around the ceiling. I know, right? Why was it ever there in the first place? Who does that? Well, it drove Craig crazy and it's the same way in the living room. So he took a day while I was at work and the kids were at the sitters to sand it all off (dining room only so far) and clean up the dusty mess that followed. Ick.

I customized a Behr paint at Home Depot to match the blue-gray that I liked and chose a satin finish because it is such a high traffic area. We got the premium plus ultra or whatever has the paint and primer in one. Even the light color we chose going over the dark color we had... only really needed one coat. But we did two for good measure.

Preparing to paint...

Guess what!

I have always sucked at trim work in the past, but something just clicked with me this time and I got really good at it! Maybe it was the brush (which was not angled, by the way)?

It took several late nights (painting the molding white, trimming around everything and finally two coats of rolling) but we finally came to this:

What a difference!

Craig switched out all the almond colored outlets and switches to white. He also really wanted a normal light switch with a small sliding dimmer.

He also spray painted the floor vents a matte black, which I love.

The next night, my project was to stain the mirror frame with a bronze metallic finish that I picked up at Michael's for ~$10. I really like how it turned out.

And then I took an evening (after Sophie's 7pm bedtime) to go out shopping at TJ Maxx and Target for decor ideas. I was really looking for new lamps - something a little more contemporary with a chunkier (white?) base and perhaps a beige, white or chestnut shade. I wanted to break up the dark look of the mirror and buffet beside each other and maybe have the lamps be enough of a focal point that I didn't need to put anything else on the buffet at all.

I have three key spaces in the dining room to decorate and I didn't want to overdo it. The wine rack definitely needed something with some height, the table is always in use and needed minimal decor to be practical, and the buffet is also frequently in use but is generally where I do seasonal decorating. I'd scoured a bunch of decorating blogs for ideas and knew that I liked a lot of white pieces (candlesticks, pitchers, urns, vases, lamp bases, dishes) as well as the addition of black/dark bronze here and there for contrast. And I love chestnut as an accent color too and wanted to pull a few small things to tie in with the drapes eventually.

So this is what I came up with for the wine rack and I LOVE IT!!!
P.S. - TJ Maxx is awesome... and so cheap!

P.P.S. - This picture was taken at night so it's not as good as it looks in the day.

The pussy willow came from Hobby Lobby - 50% off.

The black candlestick and candles came from Target.

The white pieces (and more!) are TJ Maxx.

I did bring home a pair lamps from Target with a chunky chestnut-colored base and 15" beige cylinder shade, but the shades were way huge and Craig didn't like the base. I veto'ed them too and returned them the next day. Since then Craig and my mom have both insisted that our current lamps look just fine. So I'm going to wait and keep looking. I'm just not loving the skinny "pole" of a base that they have anymore. Maybe if I get a table runner underneath to break up the dark, dark, dark colors over there I will feel differently. I like this one from Crate and Barrel.

This won't stay like this, but here are a few of the dishes I picked up at TJ Maxx for like $2-3 a piece. I'm going to play around with their placement as you'll see further down. The chargers are already ours.

So Tuesday I headed over to Fleitz's for an early bird pick of their pumpkins and found the most perfect looking white pumpkin (which is what I had in mind for fall decor in here now) for $4! Jackpot! But I need to figure out how to display it. I'm not crazy about this but it's just what I did first. I want to put a peanut and candy corn mixture in one of the bowls.

I also picked up 5 little white pumpkins for 50 cents a piece and put them in my little Pampered Chef 13x9 wicker tray on the table... for now. Like I said, I'm still just playing around.

And then I got a little creamy one with green in the ridges and decided that looked cute on the candlestick...

...and then tried the short candle here and rearranged a little... again. Hmm. Still not sure.

Another TJ Maxx purchase were these sweet, little bird plates (one dinner plate, two medium plates), again for only $2-3 a piece, that I plan to hang on a plate rack in the corner where Sophie's high chair is... but only when we're ready to move her up to the table. :)

I LOVE THEM!!!

Scroll up if you have time and see what you would think of having the plates on that wall. It'll be the wall that backs up against the living room (not the wall with the thermostat). Also, while you're scrolling up, check out the big blue spanse of a wall that backs up against the kitchen (to the left of the French door). I think that wall looks best plain so as not to be too busy and I don't want the plates there instead because of the high traffic there and potential door-slamming by the kiddos on that wall.

Finally, this needs an update:

I'm thinking of a chandelier like this or this,

but Craig is thinking we could just stain the brass parts the same color as the mirror frame.

True.

Thoughts?
That would be much cheaper...

but a chandelier might add a little warmth and depth to the room.

Anyway, that's where we are and I am so happy with it.

It looks so bright and clean and cheerful.

What do you think?