Today I am excited to share our new dining room with you. Since the day we bought the house, this room has always been our living room. But switching our dining and living rooms has allowed us to use our home in a way that better serves our daily needs.
This room is much longer and so using it for our long dining table just seems to make more sense. I took down all our existing decor and started fresh with the new setup. Much like our new living room, I did an arched gallery wall around the door to our laundry room. I am finding that this new look of gallery walls is being used to draw your eyes to certain focal points. Because this wall is so long as it goes up the staircase, the dark color seems lighter when your eyes are drawn to the white door.
The wood shelf was in this room before and just got moved over. The white buffet got moved down from the original dining room and the other white dresser we had under our TV I sold on Craigslist. Getting rid of such a large piece of furniture that we no longer needed opened up a lot of extra space in the room.
The shelving unit doubles as storage as well as a decorative display. The top shelves hold picture frames, photo books, and books.
The bottom two shelves serve as storing the not so pretty stuff. Because the dining table is in the middle of the room, you don't even really notice the lower shelves. We have our Wii and overflow DVD's in baskets along with a few of my scrapbooks.
For the buffet, I have a lot of our party type serve ware stored here. I wanted to fill in the space to look nice but still keep it minimal so that I can serve food on it when entertaining. I still have one more frame to fill!
I downsized a lot of our frames. I had a bunch of art and photos of Brent and I before. This time around I wanted the frames to look more artsy so I focused on black and white photos and printing more architectural type images from places we have traveled to.
I absolutely love how our vintage love seat looks at the table but it is too short to really be comfortable there. I almost sold it on Craigslist but couldn't get myself to let it go. So until I figure out what I want to do with it (or we have a large dinner party) it sits looking all pretty at the dining table but isn't necessarily functional there.
The room is so open and spacious it feels almost like a workroom when not used for dining. I am looking forward to being able to use the open table to work on projects and we joke if I ever homeschool, it would make a great homeschool room! We also plan on moving our chandelier over the table but that will be for another day when my husband has to climb into the attic again!
