Well, my plans to finish the side studio steps yesterday were thwarted by the rain. I was able to make some progress before it started raining, but of course I didn’t manage to finish. The good news is that it looks like there won’t be any rain today, so I’ll try my best to finish them today.
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 of work to do before I get to the dining room (a few more outdoor projects and then the storage room), but I’m really enjoying planning ahead. Not only do I enjoy it, but I want to have the entire plan in place and get everything in order so that everything is there when I’m ready to get started.
Everything starts with a dining table, and as I told you a few days ago, I’ve been looking for a dining table since the beginning of this year. And literally nothing I saw inspired me. I looked at ready-made tables that I could easily purchase and place directly in the room. Since January, I’ve been checking Facebook Marketplace about twice a week. And yet…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 from me when I saw this. This table is from Hibiscus House and it’s not the style of the table that amazed me. It’s the color. I absolutely love how bright and fresh this looks. I’ve been really loving greens more lately and this one is absolute perfection for me.
After seeing and reacting to this table, I realized that my problem with dining tables wasn’t necessarily that I couldn’t find the perfect style. The idea of ​​having a large brown table as a starting point for my dining room doesn’t inspire me at all. Don’t get me wrong. I love natural wood and try to make sure there is some natural wood in every room in our house. I love the warmth that natural wood brings to a room. I just don’t necessarily want to so much of that. I like color and I love painted furniture. That’s why I like the big things to be painted and colorful, and then I like to add the natural wood in smaller doses.
I felt so inspired when I saw this table and I can definitely imagine a pretty green table like this in our dining room. As for the actual spreadsheet, I decided that I really want this spreadsheet that I found on the marketplace, but the person who posted it isn’t responding to my request.
I don’t understand why people post things on the marketplace if they don’t respond to requests. Maybe it’s already sold.
If he doesn’t get back to me and I can’t find a similar model before I’m ready to start the room, I’ll just build my own. A table like this would actually be very easy to build. I’ve made tables before, so I know I can do this. But the one thing I’ve never done is paint a piece of furniture with a glossy varnish. This will be a new challenge for me, but I’m excited to try it out. I generally don’t like shiny painted surfaces. I almost always prefer a matte/flat finish for everything from walls to furniture to floors. But every now and then I love a beautiful shiny paint job and I think bright, fresh green deserves a shiny paint job.
Once I had this starting point in mind, I needed a pattern. And because I am me, I chose flowers. I really wish I had one of those dining rooms with lots of solid walls where I could do something really dramatic, like decorate all four walls with a floral or landscape mural. But of course our dining room doesn’t actually have much wall space.
The largest wall area is now where the picture shelves and TV are. But that’s not even a whole, unbroken wall because of the door that leads to my studio. The front wall consists almost entirely of windows.
I tore out the wall between this room and the kitchen so they are open to each other, leaving barely any wall space there.
And then I added a wall between this room and the pantry, so while I have some wall space on either side, I still don’t have a lot of it.
So putting wallpaper or a mural on these walls wouldn’t have the dramatic effect I would have liked. I have to rely on my curtains to add drama and color. I went looking for the perfect fabric for the windows and came across it at Spoonflower (affiliate link).
I’m not sure if that’s the case 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 to it so it would match the color of the table better. And I think the blues might be too blue. I need (want) them to be teal. But that’s the inspiration and that’s the direction I’m going.
If you look at the table and the fabric side by side, you can see that the green on the table is more of a yellow-green color. The fabric has a yellow-green hue, but in my opinion it is too bright.
Maybe then I’ll design my own fabric as inspiration, but with the perfect colors I need for our house. But I’ll keep looking. Like I said, I still have some time before I’m ready to jump into this project. But now I’m very excited about it. Until yesterday, and before I saw this green table, I didn’t have a vision for our dining room. I had absolutely no idea what to do there. But when I saw this green dining table, something started to click. I feel like I finally have a vision for this space and I can work with that.
