Our Dining Room: Before + After
It's finally here! We've been hinting at this post for what feels like months now (oh, it has been months? Sheesh), and we couldn't be more thrilled to finally reveal our favorite space in the house!
OUR DINING ROOM
April 2016
June 2016
Let me just begin this post by mentioning that we put down our deposit before we even saw our new home. Possibly the craziest/most irresponsible thing I've ever done with that much money, but the market is insane here in Nashville! We needed a place to live, and we knew if we found something within our price range, we were going to have to jump on it! All we had were out-dated Zillow images of each room, blurry and carpeted. Honestly, it was kind of a nightmare.
When we saw the home in person, I immediately fell in love with the large front room divided by an opening into two spaces: our living room and our dining room. Our kitchen also has a little peekaboo window into the dining room, which I kind of love-hate. Ideally, it would be an open space or just a wall --- like, make up your mind! But it just means extra light and a little shelf to place food on and holler: "Order up!"
What I did not love was that our dining room was not one, not two, but three colors. Baby blue on half of the wall, beige on the other half, and divided by a thick white chair-rail. I didn't even know what a "chair-rail" was until I found myself looking for inspiration on Pinterest (search: "white-wall-divider-molding-stuff").
I knew this was going to be an issue. BLUE AND BEIGE?! These might be two of the only colors in my closet, but they have no place paired together in my home. In case you missed it, we aren;t allowed to alter our rental walls. At. All.
We had such a difficult time choosing between thousands of prints, and I literally asked anyone I knew what their opinion was between my favorites. I decided on a pink pattern, and submitted my order. The next day, I was just browsing the site one last time, and I happened to type in "watercolor" in the search bar.
What happened next is history: basically, I sent an anxious and pleading email to the coordinator handling our collaboration, begging her to switch our print! She managed to do so, and I couldn't be more happy! #palmprinteverything
So, with our space, we ordered a seamless print, scaled to the biggest size option for maximum boldness! They offer whatever scale you'd like, so we could've had a billion little palm leaves or a few giant ones.
The bolder, the better.
We decided to maximize the space in this room by making a booth seating situation against our kitchen cut out, leaving space for our record collection. For his birthday, Collin treated himself to this record player from U-Turn Audio, and we used two 4-cube organizers from Target ($39 a piece) to make an inexpensive entertainment system.
As far as the mirror goes, it's more-or-less a placeholder for large piece of artwork we're waiting on. Our friend Charlie Brand is working on a custom piece of us to go there (sooooo excited)!
The light fixture is a DIY Collin did on our old blog, and we're still in love with it. Eventually, we'd love a Sputnik fixture, but those are definitely an investment. #goals
We LOVE this rug from RugsUSA! Every niece and nephew of ours has plopped straight down, enjoying how fluffy and squishy it is, and our dogs even use it as a dog bed most of the time.