Modern Traditional Dining Room Reveal - 2 Week, Under $300 Challenge

Our 2 week, under $300 dining room refresh is complete! Check out my original plans for the space here.

I truly did not change too much about the room, but to me it feels like a completely different space! It’s amazing what can happen with the magic of paint and shopping your house.

My goal with this challenge was to create a room I love, while spending as little money as possible. With Pinterest and Instagram ever present, I often find myself falling into the trap of my home not feeling good enough and like I need to buy a lot of new things to make it feel good enough. Does that ever happen to you? It’s easy to compare, but it’s important to remember that every home is different and the “home” feeling for everyone is different. I often remind myself how fortunate I am to have a home and to be able to renovate and decorate my home, because it is a privilege. Regardless of the type or state of your home, creating what home feels like to you takes time. This dining room has been a perfect example of that. It has been evolving since we first bought our house over 3 years ago and finally feels right to me.

Making my house feel like home is something that I truly love doing, and can be an expensive thing if I’m not careful and mindful of the changes I am making. It’s something I’m working on, but I try to not buy things just because a space “isn’t done” to fill it up. As a result, rooms can feel in flux or not finished for a while. Our dining room was perfectly functional, but it never felt done to me. It was the room that felt the least intentional (of the rooms we have renovated – we still have a few bare rooms upstairs).

I am so happy that with this challenge to myself I was able to turn a room that never felt finished to me into a room that I now love, simply by repurposing a few things I already had. Fresh paint and a new chandelier helped too.

All sources listed at the bottom of the post for reference.

When we first bought our house/Before
Progress/Before
Progress/Before
After

It’s funny to me that I ended up going back to a similar paint color that was originally in the room when we bought the house (though it is slightly lighter and less yellow that the original color). With the carpet and dated light fixture I really disliked the original paint color, but it turns out it was in the family of the right color for the room after all!

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SO WHAT CHANGED?

The chandelier, paint color, and art are the biggest changes. The previous chandelier is functional and pretty, but ultimately was not the feel I wanted for the dining room. I went through a farmhouse/boho phase while I was on the journey to figure out my style (still evolving BTW) and I am slowly letting those pieces go. That chandelier is still in great condition so I plan to sell it!

The new, more modern chandelier feels just right to me! I had been looking for a chandelier in this style for a while, but everything I loved was out of my budget. This one is beautiful and came in well under what I had hoped to spend – win, win! The reviews aren’t stellar, but we had no issues installing it and it seems to be decent quality. I think it looks nicer than the price I paid for it. The color is a bit more of a champagne gold, which works just fine in this room.

Modern Traditional Dining Room - The Adored Abode

I really, really love the new paint color. I went with Accessible Beige by Sherwin Williams. It’s the perfect light, warm beige that still feels modern. I absolutely love this color in our dining room. I can safely say I haven’t felt that about any previous color so I am very hopeful this one will stick around longer than a few years!

The mirror (that was a DIY long before I had a blog) is a look alike for this Pottery Barn mirror and was in our dining room for a while, until I moved it to our den. I have struggled with artwork for the focal wall in our dining room ever since. When I painted the new color I knew my favorite canvas that was in our living room would be perfect in the dining room. This is when the dining room refresh started to spur a living room re-arrange.

Simple Halloween Decor - The Adored Abode

Another item I took from the living room is the dresser that now serves as a sideboard. This is not the dresser I had planned to use for this space. I realized the original dresser I planned to use had lead paint, only after I spent a crazy amount of time trying to strip the old, chipping paint off the dresser, which lead to a lead poisoning scare. Nathan had to perform lead paint and dust abatement after I was convinced I had lead poisoning (thankfully, I do not and everything is cleaned up now). I wish I was kidding, but it was quite the event in our house and I wanted nothing to do with that dresser any longer. I was really sad to not use it, but know it’s best for my high anxiety self to not have it in our house and in all reality it was going to be a stretch to salvage it anyway. Thankfully I have a stash of thrifted and inherited dressers to choose from! Nathan’s grandmother’s wooden dresser that was once in our living room was the perfect solution!

I kept the windsor chairs, tufted chairs, table, striped curtains, bench, and bar cart all the same. The bench is from when I was in college, the table was thrifted for $25 and refinished a few years ago, the bar cart was the first piece I thrifted over 5 years ago – it’s been spray painted many times and was the very first blog post I ever wrote! I added in a rug from one of my favorite places to source vintage rugs. It has floated around our house, but is really the perfect size for our dining room.

Fun fact: I bought this bench from Walmart my senior year of college. Nathan laughed at me, but I told him it was in my “5 year plan” when I bought it. It was one of my first accent furniture purchases (it was cream and has since been recovered twice) and I told him it would fit in wherever I lived in 5 years – I was very confident in my purchase. Almost 10 years later it’s still here. I joke that I knew that bench was meant to be in my future.