A Moody and Affordable Dining Room Refresh!

Hello friends! Today I’m so excited to share my moody and affordable dining room refresh with you. This refresh was done in several stages over the course of almost 2 years which was key in achieving the affordable part vs. spending 1000’s in one go. I’m all about slow makeovers here. Before I dive into the photos of our new dining room, I’ll show you what our space looked like before and then tell you a little bit about why we changed things up.

The first iteration: Here’s the space when we first moved in. Clean and minimalist but also a really tight squeeze with a too-large table.

THE SPACE

To get an idea, our dining room is in one corner of the open plan first floor. In the opposite corner is the gallery style kitchen with a large island and the main living area is the remaining 1/2 of the space. While the kitchen and living room are fine, the dining space is on the smaller side. When we first moved in, we still had the rectangle dining table with us that we’d had made for our dining room in Canada. Unfortunately, that table was way too long and narrow for this space (photo above) so we sold it and downsized to a smaller rectangle table (photo below). This was a great Facebook Marketplace find and I had it re-stained from the original golden oak to a warmer walnut.

THE 1ST CHANGES AKA THE MOODY PART

Here’s the space after I had swapped tables and light fixtures, painted a navy blue accent wall (Ben Moore Gentleman’s Gray), and added an art/photo gallery wall. Oh, and we also hacked an Ikea Tarva dresser (the cheapest dresser we could find at the time) to get this tone on tone effect on the navy blue wall. You can read all about it here.

You can see how little space there is behind the head chair and the Tarva dresser.

THE CHALLENGE

Fast forward to a couple of years later and I realized this dining room was not working for us on a daily basis. The Ikea Tarva dresser could only hold a limited number of the kids’ craft supplies and the table was simply too large. No matter which way I positioned it, against the wall or centered, there was very little room to walk past it to access the kitchen.

I did attempt to place the dresser on the right hand side wall with a couple of floating marble shelves above it. I thought this might allow more room to move and we would have a cute coffee station situation too. Although it is cute, the dresser then stuck too far into the room on the opposite side and we were kind of in the same position again.

I realized that for this space to work, the solution had to be two-fold: Acquire more storage and bring in a smaller dining table, all without spending a fortune.

THE FINAL LOOK AKA THE AFFORDABLE PART

I’ve had my eye on the Target Warwick cabinet for a while. We have one in our bedroom upstairs and I thought a pair of those would make for ample storage and it would look pretty too! Plus, have you seen how much long sideboards cost? Totally not possible for us. Even paying retail price for these cabinets was not going to work for our budget and so, once again, I scoured FB Marketplace. Fortunately, I found a reseller who sold me two Warwick cabinets for $250 which is less than the price of one cabinet at Target! That sorted, I listed our dining table for sale next. Not only did it sell fairly quickly on Marketplace, with the most amazing stroke of luck, I found our new table the very same day! This is a round, four seater table from RH (formerly Restoration Hardware). It is now discontinued but it retailed for about $2600 and I paid a grand total of, wait for it… $79! COULD NOT BELIEVE IT. I don’t think I’ve ever moved so fast to buy anything in my life lol. It was meant to be!

And here we are now, two crucial changes and $329 later! I’m obsessed!

The final iteration of the dining room refresh: The round table allows for much better traffic flow, the cabinets hold so much stuff it’s a joy, and the mood just fits the rest of our open concept space so much better now!

I expanded the gallery wall with some more art, and the double cabinets allow room for decor and for the coffee station too.

The smaller, round table allows more space all around it than the deeper table/Ikea Tarva dresser. This was great for flow but also because I was able to bring down this vintage rug from our bedroom. I kept the floating shelves up for coffee mugs and art.

And that’s our moody and affordable dining room refresh! What do you guys think?

SHOP THIS POST

Here’s a mood board I made based off our dining room. I’ve linked everything I could find, along with a few similar suggestions and some additions that I think would work well.