My slow, two year process of making over our dining room on a serious budget has finally come to an end! Our dull brown space with mismatched dining set and dated chandelier is now white and bright. Take a look at the before and after pics:

The chandelier was brown with some sort of yellow speckled faux painting and yellow glass. So pretty. I sold that and our mismatched dining set on Craigslist.

Over the course of time, I painted the walls white, found an awesome second hand table and an oversized drum pendant and Eames style chairs online.

The total cost was $1,435. It broke down like this:

• 9′ second hand dining table $900
• 8 Eames style chairs on sale for $476
• Drum pendant on sale for $160
• Paint $30
• Batik rug on wall (sold out, Urban Outfitters) $89
• Minus $220 we made selling the old set and fixture on Craigslist

(The boys broke that cool white table lamp in the before picture above. Uhhh, they have broken every single one of my table lamps. The ones on either side of our bed in the master both have shattered holes in the back of them. They’re just turned toward the wall so you can’t see them. One day one of them is just going to fall to pieces onto the floor in the middle of the night!)

I hung a cheap rug on the wall for big impact on this huge white wall. It was featured on the TODAY show! Ok, ok, my picture was live for like half a second, so you probably wouldn’t call it a feature … anyway, here is my tutorial on how to hang a rug that they were demonstrating.

The electrician took down the old fixture right before he took a lunch break. So that gave me time to take the medallion moulding into the garage, paint two coats as quickly as possible with three kids bugging me, aim a fan at it and pray it would dry before he came back!