The Dining Room Project

 

I’m finally ready to show you our dining room project. It took far longer to complete than it should have, but it is complete now!

                I don’t remember where I first saw the inspiration piece, but on some blog somewhere, I came across an idea that led to a brainstorming session in my mind, and slowly, over several months, it came together.

                Our dining room, as you may remember, is a strange little room. It’s the room that holds our front door, so when you walk in the house, you’re immediately in this tiny room. It also contains the passageway to the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen. It’s a whole lot for a room scarcely big enough to hold a (small) table. When we moved in, we put our table in the middle and put our coffee buffet over to the side, under the TV. It’s worked well for two and a half years, but it hasn’t been perfect.

                I loved the idea of a fireplace in our dining room, but obviously you can’t just *poof!* add a fireplace. Not a real one, anyway. That’s when I got the idea to add a faux fireplace surround and bring our little electric fireplace into the room. I started looking on Facebook Marketplace for a surround, and I found one! Unfortunately, the seller wouldn’t respond to me, so I kept looking.

                And that is when I found this at a consignment shop. It was huge, and I wasn’t sure it would fit in our space. We put it on hold while we went home and measured, and then we came back to purchase and carry it home.

                That was on Ryan’s birthday…in April. Then the summer happened, and we never got around to painting and installing it. I’d found a link to some peel and stick wallpaper with a brick pattern, and I wanted to put it behind the interior of the surround.

                So the week before I started school, Ryan and I had a navy painting party. We cleared out the dining room, propped up the surround on some packages of toilet paper (ha!), and started painting. This is the same navy we’ve used for other things in the house (bathroom vanity, some trim, a bench, etc.) and we love it.

                While we had the paint out, we also painted a tan shelf that needed to pop a little more, and a tiny table that holds our water filter. It had been Ryan’s mom’s and it had a primitive design painted on it. It just didn’t fit the aesthetic of our beach home, so we painted it.

                Lexi tried to help, bless her heart.

                The day after we painted, we got busy installing the peel and stick wallpaper. The hardest part was trying to coordinate the bricks between pieces. We certainly didn’t do a perfect job, but we liked how it turned out.

                We brought the electric fireplace upstairs and placed it in the center!

                We absolutely love the extra room this affords us in this space. We love the ambience of the fireplace light and this winter, we’ll love the heat feature, too.

                I’m somewhat limited in how to decorate the mantel, because the TV takes up quite a bit of room. But I can put some things on each end, and I can put small things in the middle.

                I plan to get some sort of wood or fireplace tool set to place beside the fireplace – both for an added visual and to hide the outlet behind it.

                The bonus? We took the buffet piece that had been here and moved it into the living room to replace the white cabinet the TV had been sitting on. That white cabinet had been a cheapo purchase when we moved to WillowBridge, and three moves and a little water damage later, it was falling apart. It actually fell to pieces when we moved it out of the house. The brown cabinet is still quite sturdy and seems to fit this corner even better. I love how it looks!

                We are pleased with this little upgrade in TWO rooms. Stay tuned for fall and holiday decorating!