My Christmas Wish
It is a new year!! Hello, 2017! When reflecting, I cannot believe how much we have accomplished in 2016, and finishing our dining room renovation on a budget was the last thing we checked off our list before the year ended! I told my husband, that all I wanted for Christmas was to have one, completely finished, room in our house! We have come a long way from when we first bought our home 2 years ago, and although we have done many renovations, a bunch of projects, and a ton of updates, we did not have one room I could say was finished! Well, I am happy to say we pulled it off, and we have a completely finished dining room in our home! So please enjoy the before and after pictures, and read on to see what we did for our dining room renovation on a budget!
Before We Started
So here are the before pictures of when we moved in and we refinished the floors, moved in our furniture, and it has stayed that way up until about 2 months ago when we started the renovation. In one picture you can see a peek of that awful yellow paint previously in the hallway, eeeek, so glad that is gone now!
When we decided to do the dining room, the deciding factor was that the holidays were coming up and to have Christmas dinner in a finished room would be lovely, and also the fact that it was the most beat up room in our house. There was one wall that was completely termite eaten, it was repaired but not painted, and the room has also sunken a little over 160 years, so lots of cracks and holes in the walls weren’t that pretty to look at while sitting down for dinner. The paint in the room needed a major update, as well as the yellowed white paint on the 2 built-ins. The previous chandelier in the pictures you see we found in the attic with an antique store tag on it, so it was not original to the house, but we put it up anyway since we didn’t have one we liked yet. Lastly, all the outlets in the room needed to be updated, and floor molding needed to be added too. So after repairing, updating, and painting, our room has transformed, and here is the reveal!
Dining Room Renovation Reveal!
How We Kept Under Our Budget
The new chandelier is my absolute favorite! And if you follow me on social media you know I put that baby together, hung it, and did the electrical, all by myself! You can see my contraption I set up to get it to the ceiling, lol, sketchy for sure, but it worked! Proud moment! The chandelier we actually got for a very good price on black friday from gallery67.com, and it is stunning, you can check out the same one on amazon here…
After repairing all the plaster and closing up all the cracks and holes, we painted the room the same taupe color paint we used in the hallway, if you would like to check out that before and after, click here. The color is by Valspar, in the historic color, Cincinnatian Hotel Nichols Taupe. The picture, crown, chair, and floor molding, we have painted in Valspar Dove White. We added the same wallpaper up in the picture molding, that we previously did in the hallway as well, and I LOVE IT! This same product you can check out here…I love adding this to the picture molding because it is embossed, so it looks like real molding, but for a much more budget-friendly price than real molding! Here are the walls and all the cracks we had to deal with, now we have smooth walls!
I had refinished a french provincial dresser that was supposed to be for sale, but I just fell in love with it and couldn’t bare to sell it, and now it looks perfect in the dining room and was definitely a budget piece! I think we purchased it for $50, spent some time making her beautiful again, and now it looks expensive! The things chalk paint can do! If you want to learn how I chalk paint my pieces, check out my blog post, Repainting Furniture with Chalk Paint. You could easily apply this same concept to a dining table, I see tons of craigslist tables for sale every day for $100 or $200 and with a little paint and love, they would be spectacular!
One major update our home needs in floor molding, which is expensive to pay a professional to do! So my husband asked for a nail gun for Christmas, and he did the floor molding in the dining room in literally 2o minutes! He did such an amazing job, and saved us a ton of $ on our dining room renovation budget! Here he is hard at work!
Changing out outlets is such an easy and cheap update to do in any room, although electrical can sound scary, it really isn’t when it comes to basic things like outlets. Just make sure the power is off, and have an electrical detector pen, like this one here, that can read if the current is off or not for safety before touching anything, and you will be safe. My husband learned how to do electrical on youtube, and now over the years he has changed out dozens of outlets and light fixtures in our homes, that once upon a time we would have paid someone to do. Big money saver by learning something very simple!
Now that it’s Finished
So that is how we did our dining room renovation on a budget. We spent less than $500 including the tools and the chandelier, but it looks like we spent thousands in my opinion. We are so happy with how it turned out, and we finished it 2 days before Christmas! Our first meal in the finished dining room was Christmas eve dinner with my sister and her boyfriend we got to meet for the first time. It was perfect! We had an amazing year for 2016, and a very merry Christmas with my sister and her bf! If you haven’t checked out our Christmas Decor Roundup for 2016 yet, go check it out here!
We wish y’all a Happy New Year!
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