Painting Progress In The Dining Room/Office| $100 Room Challenge

It’s week two of the $100 Room Challenge and I am sharing my painting progress in the dining room/office.

Hey friends!  It’s week two of the $100 room challenge, and thanks to a couple of snow days, I am ahead of schedule in my dining room/office refresh.  If not for the weather I would have probably only gotten one of the walls in this room painted.  So I am quite happy with Mother Nature because she was on my side this past week.

You might want to start with week 1 of this challenge and see my plans for this space.

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!

Some people would knock out this whole room in one day, spending morning till night painting, but I am choosing to take it a little slower, because this room is the most highly trafficked room in our home and I need to maintain some semblance of order in here.  So I am attempting to do one wall at a time, while moving furniture and then putting it straight back into place when I am finished for the day.

I am painting the walls the same color I used in our living room and our master bathroom.  It’s a color named Gray Owl from Benjamin Moore, but I had it color matched at Home Depot in Glidden paint.  I really love this light gray shade, and my favorite thing about it is the fact that it looks different at different times of day and in different lighting, and it also looks different in each room I have used it in.  I am so happy I chose to use this color again because the dining room/office is right next to our living room, so it makes for a nice flow between the two spaces.

The picture below is a very accurate representation of the difference of the new paint color and the old.  My main goal is to lighten, brighten, and neutralize this room, and I definitely think I am going to accomplish that!

This buffet is one of the projects I have planned for a makeover.  I am planning to remove the finish from the top of the buffet and hopefully make it a more natural wood finish, and then I will paint the body of it a darker gray.  I’m going to keep the original hardware, which I had rub n buffed a few years ago.  I am going to freshen them up and reattach them.

As you can see, I have removed the curtains and the rods.  I plan to reuse the rods and just hang them up higher over the windows.  I really want to add some floral curtains that are longer than the originals.  And I finally narrowed it down and ordered a pair.  I literally spent several hours shopping online for curtains, and I have since come to the determination that I need to start my own line of curtains, because the options that are out there for affordable curtains in the longer length I was looking for and in a pattern I like are few and far between.

I was unable to find the exact curtains I had imagined, and at this point I am just hoping I like the ones I ordered.  This is the difficult part of being on a $100 budget for this room.  There are only three things I am planning to purchase for this space, and so I was on a tight budget with the curtains.  I was wanting a multi colored floral pattern, but this was the closest I could come.  I wanted blue in them so they will play nice with the rug that is staying in the room.  I ended up choosing these curtain panels from Wayfair.  They are regularly $69.99, but they are on sale right now for $28.99.

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. 

Curtain panels

I am thrilled with how much more light seems to pour into this room during the daytime and I only have two walls finished.

My vision for this room includes hanging a faux white brick wallpaper on this green wall, and I knew exactly what wallpaper I wanted to use.  You can see this wallpaper in action over at my friend Jenny’s blog, Paint Yourself A Smile. Her morning room is my inspiration for this particular wall.  The only problem is that the wallpaper she used is a whopping $140 per roll, and I need four rolls.  It’s on sale right now for $79 per roll, but that sale isn’t helping me too much, now is it?  Not with only $100 to spend on the entire room refresh.

This threw a definite wrench in my plan.  And, it is the epitome of why I call myself the girl with champagne taste and a tight budget.  I alwyas choose the most expensive option, it happens every time!  And in this instance, it is annoying as hell.  Sorry for the language, but I was seriously perturbed to realize I could not have this wallpaper.  So it was back to the drawing board to find a more affordable option that was as similar as possible.  You will be happy to know that I ended up finding a different option, and I ended up paying zero dollars for it!  You read that right!  I will be hanging wallpaper on this wall and I didn’t have to use one penny of my budget!  Let me tell you how I did it.  But before I do, below is a photo of the wallpaper I ended up ordering.

Brick wallpaper

You see, I am a very scrupulous girl when it comes to getting what I want, and I rarely give up until I have some version of it.  After a few bowls of ice cream and a couple of candy bars, I did accept the fact that Jenny’s wallpaper was not moving into our dining room/office, I started my search for an alternative.  I ended up finding this wallpaper at Amazon, and it was priced at $25 per roll.  Still out of my budget, but I noticed that there was a coupon attached where I could click in the little box and get 5% off of that price, so obviously, I clicked it.  Then I noticed that there was a promotion attached that I could click on.  It said this: save 10% for each item when you purchase two or more, save 15% on each item when you purchase three or more, save 20% when you purchase four or more, and 25% when you purchase five or more!

I started to think maybe I could pull this off!  I needed four rolls.  And I hate math so I’m not going to do it and figure out how much this would have been with the 5% discount and the 25% discount, but suffice to say I was able to get the 5% plus the extra promotional price, and it came up on my screen that if I was approved for an Amazon Prime credit card, I could get $70 off of this purchase.  Plus, I had a gift card balance of $45 that was just sitting in my account.  I decided to apply for the credit card just to get the discount.  I was approve within minutes, and when all was said and done I paid zero for this wallpaper out my own pocket!  And I vowed to my husband that I would never use the credit card.  I’m going to try really hard never to use it, and just cut it up when I receive it.  But I was desperate to see my vision for this space come to life, so this is the way I made it happen.  The offer is available to anyone on Amazon Prime, so anyone could receive this same amount off of an order.

So this coming weekend, this wall is about to get some faux white brick wallpaper, and I really really hope I like it.  Oh, and it happens to be peel and stick wallpaper, which I haven’t used before, so I will be sharing the process on the blog.

I’m going to track my progress each week with a to do list and a breakdown of the budget, so here is where I am with this room refresh after week 2.

My To Do List For The Dining Room/Office Refresh

Paint 3 walls

Hang faux white brick wallpaper on green wall

Paint buffet

Add bench to one side of dining table

Add rustic wood to top of filing cabinets

Hang new curtains

Restyle and reorganize shelves using items I already own.

Paint metal lantern hanger gold

Add art to walls for free

Add bulletin board to wall above desk

 

My Budget So Far For The Dining Room/Office Refresh

Faux Brick Wallpaper- $000

Paint- (I used paint I already had so zero)

Curtain panels- $28.99

So that is our progress for week 2.  I have already received the wallpaper, and the curtains are due to arrive tomorrow.  This weekend we plan to paint the wall the desk and shelves are on, and hopefully hang the wallpaper if we have time.  I have a three day weekend coming up so I think I can get this done by this time next week.  Wish me luck!  And now, go and see the progress of all of the other $100 Room Challenge participants.  I can’t wait to check them out myself!