Farmhouse Dining Room Makeover
Our first night in our house, my son and I eagerly set up a card table with two folding chairs as our dining room table. We were proud that this would be the first home that we would own. We had a wonderful living arrangement before moving but we just couldn't beat this feeling. I sat there thinking, how on Earth would I set up the house. The next morning we sat and ate breakfast admiring our view of each other, the card table, and empty house. I had some ideas brewing but knew that we would have to take our time in turning my dreams into reality. Who knew it would take almost two years? Yes, two years. Purchasing things like a new bed and couch were higher on our priority list. Here is the transformation we took to gather to a completed dining room.
Moving Day - As we moved the furniture in, we set up my grandmother's oval table in the dining room. We had a few chairs with wicker seating that were important to my grandmother that we could use for seating and her old kitchen chair. We put a blue tablecloth on it and called it a day. Could you imagine how plain and boring that was? Yea, boring.
As we lived with it for a while, I realized we accumulated clutter on the table and I tossed a random cake spinner thing and we put the salt, pepper, etc on top. We also made our wine corner. The wine bottle rack was found on Facebook marketplace for $20 though I am sure you could find one similar. The grey wine glass rack was on Amazon for about $36. This made us excited and we lived with it like this for almost a year before making any more changes. It was at this point I finally decided to take a "before" picture.
After doing the wine corner I settled on the fact that I wanted to do grey, wood/ brown, white, and some black. This would help to tie in other areas of our house like our kitchen and our living rooms. We have an open floor concept and I want each area to ultimately end up looking as if it were it's own space but tied in with the other areas of the house.
After I knew my colors, the rest was pretty easy. Read below for where I got everything/ what I did that you can do to aka DIY!
1. Devers Solid Wood Dining Chairs (Aka grey armchairs on the end) - These were the most expensive at Wayfair.com coming in at about $350 total. They were on sale when I bought them and they are on sale now so I would assume if you keep an eye out closely you could catch them on a deal too!
2. Four wooden chairs - These were bought at Habitat Restore for $25 a piece. I had a $5 off coupon and I got the manager to give me an additional $5 off of one chair that had some paint on it and "wasn't in the same condition as the other chairs." She didn't need to know I have a rustic chic/ farmhouse decor and that no one that visits my house will barely notice the paint. This brought them total to just around $100 with taxes.
3. Gallery Wall - Honestly, this is a hodgepodge of things that I had laying around the house or only spent a little bit of money on. They are mostly all repurposed so putting a price on it is hard. All I can say is look around your house for what you can reuse! The silver and black frames were from the dollar store and were used for our engagement party. Total - $8. The pictures of our family were printed for our engagement party at CVS for around $20. There were others I printed that didn't make it on the wall but were used at the party. Therefore, $28 that was spent for o
thing was reused here for another. The farm fresh, that's my jam, kitchen rules, and bon appetite pictures were free printable I found. For today's post, I'll break that down to half price for the frames and pennies for the prints on paper I already had laying around. Making that $12 and some change. The last supper picture was one my grandmother had that I love so free for me. The heart picture my honey had set up when he proposed. The only two things I bought for this wall was the vintage wine opener and home sign to fill in some gaps. The home sign I bought at Kohl's for $15 after a coupon was used and the wine opener was $5 at a vintage store. Last but not least, my blessed sign. This one was free because it was a DIY! I'll post a DIY sometime about it but all it is is a 2x4 that is stained and I used some chalk paint that I freehand painted the word blessed on. That brings my gallery wall total to about $32-$35. Not bad if you ask me!
4. I like the look of a centerpiece so my centerpiece is a mason jar with flowers from our wedding, so free! A salt and pepper caddy I bought for just a few dollars at another vintage shop for maybe $4. Lastly, some coasters I bought in the Bahamas which I don't remember how much they cost. I also bought the silver metal turntable (that's probably not the right word) on Amazon because other things sometimes make it onto the table and we need a spot for the mess. #familylife Total - $20
5. AtHome - The grey table cloth and the placemats were bought for about $40 at AtHome. While I absolutely love the grey linen and burlap placemats, I have decided that it is just not good for our family. I need to replace it with something plastic soon that messes can be easily cleaned up off of.
Grand total so far is $545. I say so far because at some point I would love to get a long rectangle table instead of oval that I could possibly not need to put a tablecloth on. I would also like to do some sort of lighting over the dining room table. Those both are VERY low on our list of priorities. We want that wow factor of lighting but the way we rationalize it now is that we have lighting in the dining room so we can wait on that part and work on areas of the house we want to finish still. For now, this is pretty darn close to my dream dining room. I am beyond grateful that I could make it this beautiful and homey for my family. We absolutely love sitting around this table chatting away and I can't wait to do it for many years to come!