A Thrifty Dining Room

Coming off the heels of a successful first Thanksgiving in our new home, and the fact that I can now lose the sweatpants and fit into my jeans again, I wanted to share another peek into our ongoing home improvement. At the top of our wish-list of DIY upgrades for our new house was giving our dining room a face lift. Now, our dining room is not a "proper" dining room in which we reserve use for special events or Sunday dinners. Ours is an all-purpose, every-meal-of-the-day kinda room. It's the room that links our kitchen and living room and it's the most highly trafficked area in our home. So even though it's small, our dining room really takes center stage in our house. That said, we didn't have the budget to renovate it or even the luxury of buying new furniture. But, as it turns out, this shabby dining room cleans up nice. All she needed was a little love. Well, that, a fresh coat of paint and some serious styling.

The first thing I did was paint an accent wall. For every apartment I've ever resided in, I've painted an accent wall in the same blue color. Call me predictable, but for some reason this rich blue never fails to brighten up a room. The wall I chose is visible from the moment you walk into our home, so it truly helps in dividing the house into separate living spaces. 

With the blue wall complete, I needed to decorate the rest of the room. Throughout the years, I have accumulated my furniture piece-by-piece. Pretty much like a frat house furnishes itself, minus the dirty couch on the front porch. Whether it's the navy blue painted hutch handed down from my husbands grandmother, the olive green console table from HomeGoods, a walnut colored dining room table for $50 from Housing Works thrift shop, or my giant gold ornate mirror snagged from a liquidated restaurant, nothing really matches in this room. So to keep things simple, I stuck with a black and white color scheme. The green console table was sprayed matte black and I swapped the generic drawer pulls for these adorable forest critter knobs from Anthropologie. (Note: if you plan on spray painting furniture, make sure the paint has a matte finish. It's forgiving and dries without any splotches.)

I left the hutch navy, mostly because I was too lazy to paint it black. Also, I still like the navy color. I hung the mirror on the accent wall because I love the gold/blue combination. The rest of the room is painted a light grey color and on the one remaining wall, I hung a series of black frames in an asymmetrical pattern. 

Although the we didn't have cash to replace the existing chandelier, I swapped out the boring traditional light-bulbs for these smoky filament bulbs. In keeping with the monochromatic theme, I opted for simple black and white curtains. The chairs–a carry-over from my old apartment–aren't ideal, but they're perfectly functional and a great Ikea find. Yay, Ikea! 

Last, but not least, is the stairway in our dining room. These are the stairs that lead to my toddler's room, and although I'm typically not a fan of carpeted stairs, these are the world's squeakiest. Seriously, there's not a single quiet step, so installing a runner was a must. As it turned out, however, our stairwell is so narrow that a runner covers the entire step. So, with an electric staple gun in hand and this grey runner from Overstock.com, we were able to silence those squeaky steps and sneak out of my son's room undetected. Success! 

With a fresh coat of paint and without purchasing any new furniture, this room really came together. It will always be a work in progress, but for now it works just fine as our spiffy little dining room. 

Home Improvement: DIY Built-Ins & a Wall of Frames

Warning: This post contains no food, whatsoever. If you're here for dessert porn, just scroll on through and pretend this post never happened. But, if you're an HGTV addict like myself, I think you'll enjoy this brief segue into a little DIY home improvement. 

When we first made the leap from an apartment to a house, I promised to keep you updated on any progress! Well, it's been a few months and although we're not anywhere near being finished, we have made some progress! Begin slow clap now. The desire to have our home completed and combined with the demand of real life is a constant struggle. My time for fixing up the house is now delegated to my son's blissful nap hours. I now realize that I am not capable of moving into a "fixer-upper" as I would drive myself mad. I'll begin one project, get distracted and start another, completely forgetting about the first project altogether. That is, of course, until my 16 month old waddles over with a few screws in his hand, reminding me that 1.) Oh yeah! I forgot about that picture I was hanging, and 2.) I'm terrible at baby-proofing, thank you Nolan for not swallowing those. 

On the top of the everest-like mountain of projects that my husband and I want to tackle is our living room. This is not only our living room, it's our foyer, play room, TV room and my office. Having built-in shelves has always been a dream of mine. It's just what adults do--they have built-ins stocked with beautiful books. (Or, in my case, an abundance of cake stands and cookbooks.) Luckily, we have plenty of wall space and a perfect wall to attempt built-ins. The only hitch is that they cost a fortune and need to be installed by someone who knows what they are doing (i.e. not me.) So, we decided to DIY our own built-ins and my husband Tom transformed two Ikea bookcases into a couple of fancy pants faux built-ins. 

Here's how we completed our own Ikea hack:
1. We purchased two of these white Hemnes bookcases from Ikea for $149 each. 
2. We lived with them for about a month and was unimpressed by how small they looked in the space. While we brainstormed on how to upgrade our bookcases, I bought a simple white parsons desk from Target for $70 to fill in the space under the window. 
3. In one of our bi-weekly Home Depot trips, we stumbled across a set of basic white kitchen cabinets. We reluctantly bought them for $144 each, not really knowing how they would help us solve our built-in predicament. 
4. We decided to elevate the Ikea bookcases on top of the kitchen cabinets, raising them all the way to the ceiling and creating a new storage space below. Because these weren't base-cabinets they aren't designed to hold the weight of an entire bookcase and its contents, so Tom had to reinforce them. Basically, he nailed several strips of wood along the inside frame and created a strong platform for the Ikea bookcases to sit on. The Hemnes bookcases come with feet, so we had to saw those off and screw the bottom of the bookcase directly into the top of the kitchen cabinet. Just to be safe, we also secured the top of the bookcases into the wall. These suckers aren't going anywhere!

It should also be noted that we painted our walls grey which helps the white bookshelves and trim pop!

The photos aren't great, but you get the idea. What a difference elevating a couple bookcases makes! The track lighting was our solution to not having any overhead lighting in our living room. Seriously, we don't have one light! They were the cheapest track lighting options Home Depot had (about $30 each) and they now add a gorgeous glow to our living room. Also, we can now see all the dog hair that had accumulated. Eventually, we plan on adding a strip of wood molding to hide the track lighting a little better as I'm not crazy about how large they are. 

On another wall of our multi-pupose living room, I decided to hang a bunch of frames. Like, dozens, actually. This project was actually really fun for me because I love the chance to add a personal touch to our home and photos are just the trick. Now, if you don't plan accordingly, a wall of frames can quickly turn into a disaster. Uneven frames, too much symmetry, not enough symmetry, or running out of wall space can all lead to lots of holes in your wall. I learned how to map out a wall of frames from the blog Young House Love and although theirs was a much larger project than mine, using paper as a guide was incredibly helpful. A couple rules I tried to adhere to: Try to keep the largest frames in the middle of the cluster and get as varied as you can with sizes. Don't just frame photos, postcards and fabric swatches add lots of color. Think outside of the box frame and try hanging a metal letter or something that is meaningful to you. Here's how my wall came out. I'll probably add another dozen frames, but for now it does the trick.