Well y’all, my plans to finish the side steps of the studio yesterday were thwarted by the rain. I was able to make some progress before the rain started, but obviously I couldn’t finish. The good news is that it looks like it won’t rain today, so I’ll do my best to finish them today.
So when it started raining yesterday, I went inside and sat in front of my computer, determined to come up with a plan for the dining room. I know I still have a lot to do before I get to the dining room (a few more outdoor projects and then the storage room), but I really enjoy planning ahead. Not only do I enjoy it, but I want to have the whole plan in place and organize everything so that it’s all here when I’m ready to start.
It all starts with a dining table and as I shared a few days ago, I have been looking for a dining table since the beginning of this year. And literally nothing I’ve seen has inspired me. I’ve looked at ready-made tables that I can buy and move right into the room. I’ve looked at Facebook Marketplace about twice a week since January. And still…nothing.
But that changed yesterday when I found this photo on Pinterest. If you had been sitting next to me when I saw this, you would have heard a gasp coming from me when I saw this. This table is from Hibiscus House and it’s not the style of the table that took my breath away. is the color. I love how bright and fresh it looks. I’ve really started to love greens more lately, and this one is absolute perfection for me.
After seeing this table and having that reaction, I realized that my problem with dining tables hasn’t necessarily been that I can’t find the perfect style. The idea of ​​having a large brown table as the starting point of my dining room does not inspire me at all. Don’t get me wrong. I love natural wood and try to make sure every room in our house has some natural wood. I love the warmth that natural wood brings to a room. I just don’t necessarily want to a lot of it. I like color and I love painted furniture. So I like the big things to be painted and colorful, and then I like to add natural wood in smaller doses.
I felt very inspired after seeing that table, and I can imagine a nice green table like that in our dining room. As for the actual table, I decided that I really want this table that I found on the Marketplace, but the person who posted it is not responding to my query.
I don’t understand why people post things on Marketplace if they’re not going to respond to queries. Maybe it’s already sold.
If you don’t contact me, and if I can’t find another one similar to that before I’m ready to start on the room, I’ll just build my own. A table like that would actually be very simple to build. I’ve created tables before so I know I can do it. But the one thing I’ve never done before is paint a piece of furniture with a glossy lacquer finish. It will be a new challenge for me, but I’m excited to try it. I generally don’t like glossy lacquer finishes. I almost always prefer a matte/flat finish on everything from walls to furniture to floors. But every once in a while, I love a beautiful gloss lacquer finish, and I think fresh, bright green deserves a gloss lacquer finish.
Once I had that starting point in mind, I needed a pattern. And because I am me, my mind focused on the flowers. I really wish I had one of those dining rooms with a lot of solid walls where I could do something really dramatic, like wrapping all four walls with a floral or landscape mural. But of course our dining room doesn’t have much wall space.
The largest area of ​​wall space is where the picture shelves and TV now reside. But that’s not even a complete, uninterrupted wall because of the door leading to my study. The front wall is almost all windows.
I knocked down the wall between this room and the kitchen so they were open to each other so there was barely any wall space left there.
And then I added a wall between this room and the pantry, so while I have some wall space on either side, there still isn’t much.
So adding wallpaper or a mural to these walls wouldn’t have the dramatic effect I would like. I’ll have to rely on my curtains to provide that drama and color. I started looking for the perfect window fabric and found this one on Spoonflower (affiliate link).
I’m not sure if this is the one. In fact, it probably isn’t. Yo love those big pink flowers. But the other colors may not be quite correct. I wish the green had a little more yellow to it to coordinate better with the color of the table. And I think the blues might be too blue. I need (want) them to be teal. But this is the inspiration and this is the direction I’m heading.
When you see the table and the fabric side by side, you can see that the green of the table is more of a yellow-green. There is a yellow-green color to the fabric, but I think it is too bright.
So I might end up designing my own fabric with this as inspiration, but in the perfect colors I need for our home. I’ll keep looking though. Like I said, I still have some time before I’m ready to jump into this project. But now I feel very excited about it. Until yesterday, and before seeing that green table, I had no vision for our dining room. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do there. But once I saw that green dining table, things started to fall into place. I feel like I finally have a vision for this room and it’s something I can work with.
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Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 upper that my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has MS and can’t do physical work, so I do most of the house work myself. You can learn more about me here.
