new dining room on a budget

i've tweaked and tweaked my dining room a lot, but i think i finally have it right.   i've always LOVED the color green on the walls.  it's so beautiful, so rich, so....dark.  here's a picture of my dining room at 10 in the morning, with the morning sun (and son!) hitting the front of the house.

love how cleaned up the place? just keeping it real.

i didn't touch up the picture at all, this is really how dark it was.  ugh.  there was never a point in the day that you could be in the room without the lights on and not feel like your in a cave.  even though we have a nice tall window and it faces the morning sun the room stays shadowed because our yard and all of our neighbors have wonderfully large trees that i wouldn't trade for anything.  so i decided to ship the kids off to my mom's recently and spent the time renewing my dining room.  so. much. fun.

in addition to painting the room, i had to paint the furniture.  not. so. much. fun.  but desperately needed.  several months ago while the children were painting canvases i somehow mixed nonwashable paint into their washable paint.  nothing would get this paint off!  nothing!  it bothered me every time we sat down to eat at the table.   no matter how clean the dining was, it always  looked dirty thanks to that paint.  new furniture would have been a waste of money considering i'm perfectly capable with a can of paint and a brush.  

i wanted to recover our chairs again since the polka dot hadn't held up very well.  even though i used stain protectant and i regularly tried to clean the chairs they were no match to my three children.  new fabric would be costly and i hadn't had them on the chairs that long, just since before thanksgiving.  i figured i could throw them through the wash and hope they'd clean up.  

this was one of the cleanest chairs...so gross!

ok, are you ready to see the difference?  remember the first picture was so dark and it was untouched.  this picture isn't touched up either.  same time of day with bright and sunny weather.....

are you seeing what i'm seeing?!  what a difference a shade of paint makes! it's called "air kiss" from valspar. it took about two coats to cover the dark green. can you believe the difference?!  i think a side by side comparison is in order, don't you?  

holy cow!  i'm still speechless when i see these pictures. i promise i didn't lighten one and darken the other.  they were both done on a sunny day at 10am.  craziness.  the blue just reflects the sunlight soooo much.   my chairs came out nice and clean, albeit a little faded.  i painted the furniture a nice muted black and added several coats of poly to the top.  we decided to take the leaf back out of the table and just deal with being a little cramped.  i didn't do much for the decorating except add a work-in-progress gallery wall.  i did make some new napkins and threw my stuffed pears into a bowl to help bring some color and fun into the room. i was worried the pale blue walls and the black furniture would be too...i don't know...too "something that wasn't me."  that probably doesn't make sense to anyone else but me.

little fuzzy but you get the idea, i have at least 4 more frames waiting to be painted

priceless canvas art and a shadow box i made to house our remaining sand dollar collection 

smaller priceless canvas in the top left corner.  i'm praying the daisy plates stay on the wall!

i didn't plan out the gallery wall because that's too much of a hassle for me.  i used existing frames, goodwill finds, and castoffs from my mom to make the wall.  i put some of the pictures against scrapbook paper to give some pops of color.  i like that is still growing and can be adapted on a whim.  i like the eclectic look and i don't think anyone should be afraid to start a gallery wall even if there is no end result planned.   i'm pleased as punch with my new dining room!   all together i spent less than $60....i had to buy the paint for the furniture and the walls (the bulk of the money), the cheap frames, the plate hangers, and the shadow box (bought with a coupon!).   not too bad, huh?