Dining Room/Office Refresh | $100 Room Challenge

It’s week one of the $100 Room Challenge and I am planning a dining room/office refresh!

Area Rug

Hey friends!  I am so excited for today because I have decided to join the $100 Room Challenge for the second time and this time I will be doing a dining room/office refresh on a $100 budget.  And I will be sharing it all with you each Wednesday, with the final reveal happening at the end of this month!

If you are new to the $100 Room Challenge you can read more about it here.  But the basic premise for the challenge is this: you get one month, and $100, to completely makeover one space in your home. I know what you may be thinking… $100 is not a lot of money. Just wait. What you can do with $100 (and a little creativity) will absolutely blow your mind.  And if you don’t believe me, just follow along, and click through and see what the other participants are doing for this challenge, and you will see so many great things happening with just a $100 budget.  You can see the mudroom I made over for my first time participating in the $100 Room Challenge here.

If you found me through the $100 Room Challenge Link up, welcome!  I am so happy you are here!  My name is Nicki and I am the blogger behind Sweet Parrish Place.  I love to share our DIY and home decor shenanigans, along with some organization, fashion, travel and other lifestyle types of topics.  Thanks for reading!

So as I mentioned above, I am planning to do a refresh on my dining room for this challenge, and I am hoping to give this room a new look and feel.  Today, I want to share some before photos of the space, and then I am going to give you an idea of what I have in mind to refresh this space.  For those of you who don’t know, my dining room/office is a shared space.  It is not ideal, but we don’t really have any other space for a home office in this home, so we are making the best of the situation.  Let’s take a look at where I started with this room, and where we are with it today.  The photo above at the top of this post is the most recent  depiction of the space and this photo is from my Christmas dining room tour I did in December.

This is the room before we moved in.

All of the furniture and belongings pictured above belonged to the previous owner.  This is what the room looked like shortly after we moved in.  Please excuse the quality of the photos.  This was pre-blogging days!  We basically plopped in the table from our old home and we did purchase the desk for the space from Ikea.

I painted the room about 6-7 months after we moved in, and I was never in love with the results.  But I didn’t have the time or energy to repaint it, especially when we had so many other things to be done in this home.  I kind of vowed not to repaint any room until every room had been painted at least once.  And I am happy to say that every room has been painted in this house except the family room downstairs, which we have no plans to change.

This is what the room looked like after I painted it.  I do want to mention when you are viewing these photos, keep in mind that these are photos I am using that were taken during various seasons and stages this dining room has went through to get where it actually is today.

So I decided to update the dining room for this challenge because I really want to lighten up this room and give it a much more neutral backdrop.  Especially because I would love to take more blog photos in this room, but I always hate it because one of the walls is green and it photographs horribly.  I really want this room to be a good place to take photographs for multiple things I do on the blog.

At this point, I was using a cream colored shag rug that I had from our previous home.  I used it because it was basically all I had and it was not in the budget to get a new rug at the time.  I had painted the room back in 2012, you can read that post here, and it was in the very early stages of blogging for me. The three brown walls are a Behr color called garden wall, and the green accent wall is another Behr color called oolong tea.  Honestly, it has been five years since I chose these colors and this accent wall, and what was I thinking?  I am so ready to lighten up this room you guys!

The next change we made to the dining room/office space was to add these shelves over the desk.

The buffet you see in the space is something I have owned for like 25 years, and it won’t be going anywhere.  I do have plans to paint this piece, but I’m not sure if I will have time to make that happen for this challenge, but we shall see.  Ideally I will make it over, but there are some other things that will take priority over this, like painting the walls.

In the photo above, you can see that we had removed the cream area rug and were going with bare floors for a while.  Our dog, who has since passed away, had completely ruined that rug by peeing on it so many times, so after she passed, we threw it out and it took a little while before I replaced it.  You can also see in the above photo that I had brought in a couple of thrift store file cabinets that I made over for this space.  It added storage to the office part of the room that was desperately needed.  These will stay in the room but may get another little update.

A couple of years ago, we replaced the chandelier in the room with a $5 yard sale chandelier that I made over.  We also moved the light so that it was centered over the table.  since we are using this space as both an office and dining room, our dining table is not in the center of the room like it would normally be, so we just swagged it over to be centered over our table with a ceiling hook.  I did not want this to be permanently moved because eventually the table may be back in the center of the room.

We did purchase a new rug eventually, and this will also stay in the room because I still like it a lot.  You can see another view of the rug in the very first photo in this post.  We have had this rug for over a year and I have never actually written a blog post about just the rug!

So, that is basically the journey of our dining room so far, and the photo above was taken just last month, so that is what the dining room looks like, except for one thing.  We did replace the desk chair a few weeks ago, and this is what the new chair looks like.  I shared this new chair during my Christmas dining room tour as well.  The chair is so new that I almost feel like it should be included in my $100 budget for this space, but since I purchased it with a gift card I had, it never really came out of any budget of mine because I didn’t pay for it with our money.  I do really love this chair and it is a huge improvement.  It is the first time we have ever purchased a brand new chair for this desk area.  Before that, we had various thrift store chairs in the space.

Please note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which allows me to make a small commission from your purchase, but your purchase price stays the same. 

Accent Chair

Now that you have seen where our dining room currently is, I want to share some of my plans for the dining room/office refresh.  To be honest, I am kind of going with the flow with this room and my main goal is to paint the walls and make the space lighter and more neutral.  So I plan to paint the room a lighter, more neutral color, and I am hoping to use some paint that I already have so that will be free.  I am hoping that I have enough left over from when we painted our living room to paint our dining room, which is right next to the living room.  Our living room is a Benjamin Moore paint color called Gray Owl.

This is a photo I took standing in my dining room looking out into my living room with the Gray Owl color on the walls.  Getting rid of the green accent wall is the thing I am the most ready to change.  Do you ever look back at the things you used to like and wonder what on earth you were thinking?  Yeah that is me with the green wall.  I like the idea of the dining room/office and the living room being the same color, it will flow nicely.

So the major change in the room will be the paint color on the walls.  I will probably change the curtains as well to something completely different.  I plan to purchase or make curtains that are longer, so the rod will be raised up higher over the window.  I would like to tweak the file cabinets I have in the room by adding some rustic looking wood over both of them to make them look more like a piece of furniture.  I am currently tossing around the idea of possibly painting either the table and chairs, the desk and shelves, or the buffet.

This dining room/office is a mish mash of furniture that are all in different styles, and there is not much I am going to be able to do with that within this budget.  The table and chairs are from our previous home, and in a perfect world I would replace this table and chairs, but that is not going to happen right now.  I would like to be able increase the seating around the table by bringing in a bench that will go behind the table and in front of the window, which will seat two people.  Then I will be able to place two chairs on the other side of the table so we will be increasing the seating from 4 to 6.  I am hoping to find something that I can use as a bench at a thrift store or on Craigslist.  Here is a little vision board I made for the room.

I would like to change out some of the storage boxes that are currently being used on the shelves over the desk.  Some of them were made using old shoe boxes, and I would like to upgrade them, but we’ll see if that is in the budget or not.  I also want to remove the bulletin board squares over the desk and find some other type of solution to be able to hang things here over the desk area.  I plan to shop my house and make some changes to the wall decor and other decor in the room using things I already have.

I am working on a 4 week time frame for this makeover, so I am not sure exactly how much time I will have.  So which pieces of furniture I paint will be based solely on how much time I have.  The reveal of this room will happen in exactly 4 weeks from today!  I sure do hope you will stick with me through this challenge and find out how this dining room/office refresh turns out!  I hope to be able to really change the look and feel of this space and still keep within my $100 budget and my 4 week timeframe.  Wish me luck!  Now, go and check out some of the other bloggers who will also be participating in the $100 Room Challenge.  I can’t wait to check them out myself!

 

Casual Christmas Dining Room

Boys Bedroom Makeover Reveal