Well, y’all, my plans of finishing the side studio steps yesterday were thwarted by rain. I was able to make some progress before the rain started, but obviously, I wasn’t able to finish. The good news is that it looks like today will be rain-free, so I’m going to do my best to get those finished up today.
So when it started raining yesterday, I came inside and sat down at 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 get everything ordered so that it’s all here when I’m ready to get started.
It all starts with a dining table, and as I shared a few days ago, I’ve 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 just purchase 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 came across this photo on Pinterest. If you had been sitting next to me when I saw this, you would have heard an audible gasp come from me when I saw this. This table is from Hibiscus House, and it’s not the style of the table that made me gasp. It’s the color. I absolutely love how bright and fresh this looks. I’ve really started loving greens more lately, and this one is absolute perfection to me.
After seeing this table, and having that reaction to it, I realized that my issue with dining tables hasn’t necessarily been that I can’t find the perfect style. It’s that the idea of having a large brown table as the jumping off point for my dining room doesn’t inspire me at all. Don’t get me wrong. I love natural wood, and I try to make sure that every room in our house has some natural wood in it. I love the warmth that natural wood adds to a room. I just don’t necessarily want so much of it. I like color, and I love painted furniture. So I like the big stuff to be painted and colorful, and then I like to add the natural wood in smaller doses.
I felt so inspired after seeing that table, and I can totally imagine a pretty green table like that in our dining room. As far as the actual table, I decided that I really want this table that I found on Marketplace, but the person who posted it won’t respond to my inquiry.
I don’t understand why people list things on Marketplace if they’re not going to respond to inquiries. Perhaps it’s already sold.
If he doesn’t get back to me, and if I can’t find another one similar to that before I’m ready to start on the room, I’m just going to build my own. A table like that would actually be very simple to build. I’ve built tables before, so I know I can do that. But the one thing I’ve never done before is paint a piece of furniture with a shiny lacquer finish. That will be a new challenge for me, but I’m excited about trying it. I generally don’t like shiny lacquer finishes. I’m almost always prefer a matte/flat finish on everything from walls to furniture to floors. But every once in a while, I do love a gorgeous shiny lacquer finish, and I think that bright, fresh green deserves a shiny lacquer finish.
Once I had that jumping off point in my mind, I needed a pattern. And because I’m me, my mind went to florals. I really wish I had one of those dining rooms with lots of solid walls where I could do something really dramatic, like wrapping all four walls in a floral or landscape wall mural. But of course, our dining room doesn’t actually have much wall space.
The largest area of wall space is where the picture ledge shelves and TV are now. But that’s not even a whole, uninterrupted wall because of the door leading to my studio. The front wall is almost all windows.
I knocked out the wall between this room and the kitchen so that they’d be open to each other, so there’s barely any wall space left there.
And then I added a wall between this room and the pantry, so while I do have some wall space on either side, there’s still not much of it.
So adding wallpaper or a mural to these walls wouldn’t have the dramatic effect that I would want. I’ll have to rely on my draperies to bring that drama and color. I started searching for the perfect fabric for the windows, and I came across this one on Spoonflower (affiliate link).
I’m not sure if this is the one. In fact, it probably isn’t. I love those big pink flowers. But the other colors may not be quite right. I wish the green had a little more yellow in it to better coordinate 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 on the table is more of a yellow-green. There is yellow-green in the fabric, but I think it’s too bright.
So I might end up designing my own fabric with this as the inspiration, but with the perfect colors that I need for our house. 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’m feeling 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 in there. But once I saw that green dining table, things started clicking. I feel like I finally have a vision for this room, and that’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 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.