Dining Room Inspiration

Well, we've been in our house for nearly two years and so far just one room is completely finished--Holden's room. We definitely have big plans for all the other rooms but, with me going part-time, some of the projects will have to wait. That being said, for nearly two years, the first two rooms people see when they walk in our front door--front room to the left, dining room to the right--have been the two grossest rooms. The dining room has sat completely empty, while the front room has been the keeper of all things: Aurora's games and art supplies, all of our bills and files, books, and, well, anything else you can think of. Basically it looks like a tornado swept through those two rooms and carried everything away from the dining room and hurled it into the front room. So those two rooms really cannot wait.

Jose has spent the majority of the past few days working on the dining room. I'll definitely share before and after pictures once it's finished, but for now I thought I'd share some of the inspiration for the room.

I have this great inability to make decisions anyway, but for some reason, the planning for this room has been so hard! The room already had a chair rail and some decorative trim on the lower half of the wall, so one of the options was to switch out the decorative trim with something a bit more simplistic and just repaint it all white (from the maroon that it was before). The top half of the wall was mauve, but Jose painted it gray when we first moved in. Other options were bead board or wainscoting. So I was scouring Pinterest one day, hoping to make a decision between the three when I saw the best thing ever. Brick. I became obsessed. We were totes doing brick. I mean, seriously, how amazing is this:

Right!?!?! I was in love. 

Well, friends. I would love to tell you more about how the brick process is going for us, but unfortunately our dining room story doesn't end with brick, as I'd hoped it would. Turns out, it's just way out of our budget right now. It would've cost between $700-$1000 just to do the brick on one wall, and then we still would've had the other three walls to do. We even looked into faux brick paneling and chalk paint and, while it would be way cheaper, it still would be about $300 for the one wall and, again, we still would've had the other three to do. So the brick will have to wait. 

It took me a little bit to get over the brick, at first, but we are going to go with bead board and I'm super excited about it! Jose already has all the window trim done, as well as the bead board and chair rail. Fortunately, we were able to salvage the chair rail that was already in the room and we'll use that in the new dining room. That saved us about $50. Below are some things I hope to include in our dining room:

A House is Made sign

Threshold dish set

Eliana Black Linear Glass Globe Chandelier

Stella Hanging Pocket

Glacier Peak Standard Bookcase

Wood Box Centerpiece DIY

And these are some of the photos I found that inspired our dining room:

I'm so lucky Jose enjoys doing this type of thing and is willing to do the dirty work to make my ideas come to life. I'm definitely not handy with tools or anything like that like he is. My own Chip Gaines. I actually offered to help him the other night, once I got home from work, to which he responded, "Sure, why don't you take this (piece of bead board) and go cut it on the table saw out in the garage?" I'm pretty sure I did one of those awkward glares that they used to do in The Hills, before cutting to commercial. He just laughed and told me to go away. 

Anyway. Stay tuned for before and afters! Xo