Tags
Dining Room Decorating Ideas, diy, Furniture Refinishing
You may recall from some previous posts that this is what my dining has looked like for the past few years. Let’s just say that while I love the curtains, rug, and mahogany dining set, the furniture really needed some work. The dining room set was handed down to us from my parents, and I do love having a more formal look for this space, but because my mother used some of the chairs in our old living room and some in our old dining room, they were covered in different fabrics. I also have two more chairs that had broken and had a third fabric on them because they didn’t make the cut the last time she recovered them. The table had also gotten really scratched up over the past several years. So when we were working on our kitchen renovation, we decided to bring the dining room up to snuff at the same time.
We sent the table and broken chairs to The Strip Joint (yes, that’s really what this furniture restoration place is called) in Saunderstown, RI to be refinished and repaired. They came back looking as good as new!* I was a bit torn on which way to go for the new fabric for the chairs. Part of me wanted to bring in another bright color like pink or coral, and another part of me wanted to go with some really cool fish fabric that mimicked Gyotaku printing. And while I love geometric prints, I thought this room already had enough of them. But while perusing the local fabric store, this chinoise pattern caught my eye, and I knew right away that it was the one! I recovered the chairs myself (well, my four year old helped!) using the simple method of unscrewing the seats from their frames, placing them atop the fabric–faced down, cutting to size, and wrapping the fabric to the back side and fastening it with a staple gun.
And here is the new and improved look! This room also got a fresh coat of paint in the same Benjamin Moore Stunning for the upper walls and Linen White for the chair rail and below. After all the dirt and dust from the kitchen renovation, it really needed it! The entrance to this room also got widened as part of the kitchen renovation, and we can slide the barn door across it. As much as I love having a separate dining room, doing this means that we can now fit all of the leaves in the table and still get a chair at either end when we’ve got a larger group for dinner.
We also created a new built-in bar in this room by removing two back-to-back closets, but I’ve still got to photograph that so stay tuned!
*Note: Refinishing and repair is not an inexpensive endeavor. In fact you could probably buy a new set for as much as I paid, but I’m a firm believer in using antiques and that old furniture is built better than most new furniture so it’s well worth the cost. I also only had one of my three table leaves refinished to cut down on the cost because I typically have a table cloth on the table when I put more than one leaf in.