Bringing More Color into the Dining Room

For today’s post I am showing you my plans for revamping my dining room space. Some will say I have enough color there – but you can never have enough color really!  It just all has to blend. My dining rooms chairs really need an update, badly. So, here’s my revamp plans so far…

It all started with this fabric.  It’s called Rosenburg from Robert Allen fabrics in Peony.  I’ve been in love with it for a long time.  The embroidery is beautiful and it has all the colors that are in my dining room and living room. Leave it to my engineer husband to say

“Don’t you think this will rip? I don’t think it’s very practical for the dining chair seats”

OK – he has a point – even though we only use our dining room about 7 or 8 times a year, if that! We have small grandchildren now and so maybe it’s not the best choice for today.  I had planned on re-painting the dining room chairs in Annie Sloan Scandinavian Pink Chalk Paint, adding some gold wax accents and antiquing them.  

And with some gold wax highlights…

These two things would improve the look of my old dining chairs (don’t you think they are due??)

The 12 dining room chairs, table with multiple leaves, double china cabinet, server and tea cart that I bought over 10 years ago for such a bargain price (I think the entire set was $3000).  The set has a little bit of sports history as well – the man who owned it is in the Baseball Hall of Fame…not as a player (darn!) but as a sports journalist (more up my alley…spoken like a true former English major!). That helped me convince my husband that it was a good deal. Sports stuff always works!

So, I figured I should make a few samples to see how the Scandinavian color would look – and then decide if I was going to use this or not (with another fabric choice). My husband was dead set against too much pink in the room because the walls are a pink coral and other elements of the room are a bit feminine.  You have to please the men in your family as well, I guess.

Making samples is a common occurrence for me for my clients.  In my own house – I usually skip that and rush headlong with whatever color takes me at the time.  Not always a great idea.  Most of the time it works out…and then there are the times when it doesn’t.  My husband knows this about me – so he wanted to see samples.  I guess he is now my client too!

Above, the colors of my living room.

Where the sofa is now will be the new location of the dining table and chairs. My husband doesn’t know it yet – but I plan on buying a round dining table!  Sofa will be going into our former dining room, which is adjacent to this space.

The Scandinavian Pink just wasn’t the right choice. Although I had used it before on accessories that I’ve used in the room (but I always did a drybrush of Cream or Off White over it), my husband would not tolerate a light pink.  So I then decided to sand back to the darker wood, use clear wax and add some gold wax to highlight the raised portions and then dark wax to antique further.  I liked it so much better.  But, I still felt it was wrong and it would compete too much with what was on the walls and the fabric that I loved would also be a bit competitive also.

So…I made a sample of Annie Sloan Old White with a little bit of Cream in it.  Much more neutral of a choice – but still so pretty (especially with some antiquing and gold wax highlights). My husband loved this.  I found another fabric (Robert Allen’s Abide in Clay colorway) that would work better with my color scheme. AOK with hubby too (I hate that word but I am a little tired of writing husband!!!).

The only thing I need now is 1) time to do all this and 2) Some extra money for that round dining table!

I have until Thanksgiving.  I think I’ll make that deadline.  Stay tuned!!