Traditional Dining Room Interior Design – Good afternoon! I’m Susanna, a serious DIYer and mother of two young children. Follow along with my DIY fixer-upper home repairs, sewing and crafting projects, real food recipes, and stress reduction goals.
I believe you can love your home the way it is and make big changes and designs to make it better.
Traditional Dining Room Interior Design
For people like me who love to update our homes, no place is ever truly 100% “done”. I will continue to make small seasonal changes, as our family’s function and style is forever changing, I’m sure! But in this fixer-upper house, I have to start with a strong, beautiful foundation, and so far the only thing I’ve “finished” is our bedroom.
Antoinette Ay200t+8x600s+2x600a 11-piece Traditional Dining Table & Chair Set
Enter!! I’ll show you the “before,” my inspirations, trickiest pieces to find, DIYs, and more!
First, a look back at where we started. Here’s the room on closing day (see all our first photos here). It’s hard to tell, but it’s two different shades of aqua paint over the wallpaper. Original light fixture, but zip attached to shorten the chain.
As is often the case when living in a house I did this room in stages. Before moving in, we painted the walls and ceiling white (alabaster from Sherwin Williams – flat for the ceiling, but the same color as the walls). (First we removed the entire house’s curtains and curtain rods, dusted the cowls, and cleaned the windows as best we could.)
The room is 12′ by 12′ even though it looks like a rectangle between the doors. We use it that way, the table runs in that direction and the lanes on each side.
Bobby’s Eclectic Traditional Design: Balancing Classic And Contemporary In The Dining Room And Entry
I should also explain that I have been thinking about decorating this dining room for over a year and a half. We went through this house a year before we bought it because it was an owner for sale and we weren’t ready to sell it like we thought. Right after we sold our last house (and our dining room furniture), I was decorating this dining room in my head after only going through it once!
The house was much more traditional than the one we came from, but I wanted it to be fresh and edgy. I really liked the look of a farm-style table with black Windsor chairs. These two rooms in particular stayed with me. Note the antique eye table, simple window coverings, a few stripes on each, and simple black or gold lighting.
I’ve been looking for farmhouse dining tables with extensions in the past, but I couldn’t find one in our budget that was larger than 72″ with an extension, so I decided to get this fixed and 72″ seat. . I bought these solid wood Windsor chairs and I love them! As for Streak, the rug I’ve found is that perfect shaker’s simplicity and real wool.
After we moved in I ordered the chairs, dining table and rug. Since that window faces the street and needs privacy covers, I literally rolled sheets of white tissue paper over the windows. That covered the bottom 8″ or so – you can see if you squint at this photo! In this photo from my one month progress update, the chairs had arrived and nothing else.
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So for a while I put the chairs/table/rug together, I threw some art on the wall (the image railing makes it easy to do this quickly and temporarily), and we used it like this (see here). I really wish I had cut that zip tie to hang the lamp under!! Face palm. A free upgrade that I didn’t do until a few weeks before changing the light fixture anyway!
To finish this room I need to get three main things under control. First, the light fixture. I shared some options in that last post… but nothing felt right. So I saw this chandelier in two different homes on Instagram and actually, fell in love!! It’s very modern, yet the antique brass makes it perfectly warm and cozy. It still has the right swing to pair with our traditional table and chairs. I mean, that table doesn’t look “farmhouse” here, does it? A black workshop would have added too much black with chairs and dark frames.
In love with this chandelier (it’s from Kichler), also available here. It’s a rectangle, see?! I love that it adds to the linear feel of the room and looks different at different angles.
It was out of stock when it was discovered exactly. I contacted Kichler about it and they provided it to review here! I absolutely love it and I found a similar circle if you want a circle.
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I had to buy the bulbs separately. They are dimmable, LED and have a great tubular shape with Edison filaments.
The second big question mark was the art to fill that 12′ long white wall. I love big art, but I also like to mix things up from room to room… We have great big pieces in the living room (big framed photos, TV, fireplace) and I don’t want another big rectangle. living room Same view. I loved the look of a gallery wall and realized I have six of these cool black/white pencil drawings that Jason’s grandfather did and gave to us over the years. (I used it in our last dining room and entryway in this house and we love it!) I only had six matching frames and it would make a great gallery wall!
That’s huge, isn’t it!? Slightly wider than a 56″ wide buffet. On a 12′ wide wall, that’s almost perfect!!
I did a post on how I hung gallery wall/ affordable custom frames (the art is standard size, but I wanted extra large rugs, so I went custom!).
Dining Room Design Plan Tweaked And Embellished For A Complete Look — Designed
As soon as we hung the art, before we ate the buffet downstairs, I was so happy to catch a glimpse of this wall. I love this treatment here!
Speaking of the buffet – the third and final big piece, the buffet was the hardest to figure out in this room. Inspired by these two pictures, I wanted a painted wood sideboard that was kind of antique that wasn’t quite a shaker look. (We already have so much wood in this room and in the house that I wanted to break it up with another solid color.) I was totally ready to DIY because I didn’t want to keep checking HomeGoods and spend $400. ever There was something particularly right about it.
I searched Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for months for “sideboard”, “buffet”, “sideboard” etc. This wall is for a long, low wardrobe. This $20 piece features stained cherry wood. No zeros are found. I took it the same day!! (Here’s my blog post on how I repaired and painted it.) It’s actually a media cabinet, so it’s a little deeper than I expected, and it has a power strip inside, so it holds all your DVD player cords… and it totally works for extra storage here. , we still have plenty of room to go around.
I think it makes the room really fun!! It is a unique piece and almost completely fills the space under Art. (I may one day move the frames closer together, which will make the entire gallery wall look narrower than you might think.)
Dining Room Design Styles
Of course I’ll play with Toppin’s style, but for now I’ve kept it simple. I crave clutter-free surfaces!
My favorite details here are the antique brass switch plates and outlet covers. I shared on here why changing the plastic white made such a difference in this room!! See that switch plate over there? Such an easy upgrade and so much better than the old chunky white!
Here you can see one of the outlet covers, which unfortunately brings me to my least favorite part of the room…the desk.
I spend a lot of time sitting at this desk. I don’t have a laptop so I work on our desktop computer with a big black tower. I also record the podcast here, so I usually have some recording equipment set up there. It’s a nice corner for a desk, functional – between the kitchen and the living room, just the right width for a simple table. I can even take one of the dining chairs when I use it, so I don’t need an extra desk chair (which often isn’t pretty). But it’s still a big electronics dark place in this beautiful room.
Before & After: Traditional Dining Room And Living Room Makeover
Until we move rooms and move upstairs, or I get a laptop, this will be an essential part of this room!