We Bought a Farmhouse

stories of renovation, home decor inspiration & sprinkles of country life

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New Dining Room Plans: Farmhouse Grays

Our dining room, right after we moved in, and took out all our kitchen cabinet doors and drawers to paint them.

Our dining room is pretty much what sold me on the house. There were, of course, many other things that I loved about it, but the huge windows overlooking our backyard was one of the first things I saw when we walked in, and I thought to myself, "I wanna have breakfast here every morning for the rest of my life." This is also the room where we sat together with our realtor to make an offer on this house, hands shaking at the thought of not getting it, and stomachs fluttering at the excitement that this could be ours in just a few months. It will always hold a special place in my heart. Josh sometimes jokes that I never want to leave this room, because I spend a lot of time here in the mornings (I'm sitting here now writing this post!).

This room wasn't always meant to be a formal dining room. I actually think our front room, that we currently use as a sitting room of sorts, was the dining room at some point. But the view we have is just too good to not see every day. And while I wish our dining room was a smidge bigger, it's actually quite perfect in my eyes.

When I've thought about a formal dining room over the years, I've had, as with everything else, a pretty clear picture of how I wanted it to look. Thankfully, Josh was totally on board with the vision, too. I picked out our dining room table and chandelier about four years ago, and I pictured lots of warmth with a tuscan influence, and a touch of rustic/farmhouse (duh). When we moved in, I picked out a paint color for our kitchen called Somerset Peach by Benjamin Moore, and didn't even need to swatch any other colors on the walls - it was what I always thought we'd have in our dining room. But it's taken me a while to pull the trigger on actually painting the space, and I think it's because I knew it wasn't the right choice for the room, which made me a little sad.

Swatches of the Somerset Peach color on the walls.

Our kitchen, which opens directly into our dining room, and is a bright space with crisp shades of white and light gray. It was a pretty stark contrast to the warm tuscan peaches I was planning on for the dining room. Something felt off and I just couldn't commit to the color or the style even though it was what I wanted for years. Earlier this week, I had a revelation that I just needed to let the warm dining room color go because both of the spaces had to work together, not fight against each other. I felt so much better once I just accepted this and moved on with my life (dramatic much?). It's not the room we had envisioned and designed in our heads for years, but once I decided on painting it the same light gray that's on the kitchen walls, I had new ideas to run with (thankfully, Josh liked those, too!). And so, a new inspiration board for our dining room, and where we're at now with our project.

Top to bottom, left to right: White Wisp paint by Benjamin Moore; Farmhouse Wares grainsack fabrics; Milk and Cream pillow from PeekPillowOriginals on Etsy; Camilla chandelier from Pottery Barn, Farmhouse centerpiece from Farmhouse 5540; Sumner dining table from Pottery Barn; Gabriella dinnerware from Pottery Barn.
The day we closed on our house, we bought this dining table at Pottery Barn* because I'd been drooling over it for literally four years and it was on super sale. So when we decided we really needed to stick with the light gray we'd painted on our kitchen walls, I panicked a little because our dining table is so warm (and there was seriously no way we were getting rid of that table). But, we can totally make it work. The paint swatch of White Wisp in the collage above is pulling really green, but it's actually a straight up airy, white-gray in person. Soon, we'll have a contractor come over to move our hardwiring in our dining room so we can hang the branchy chandelier (currently, there's a ceiling fan in there that's not centered in the room which is driving.me.crazy). We also own the rustic dinnerware* pictured above, which I'm contemplating stacking in the middle of the table as a pretty centerpiece, and I'm so inspired by this tabletop decor from Farmhouse 5540 (literal farmhouse porn over on that blog!). We're heading in a direction that I didn't see us taking, but I'm kind of feelin' it and we're both so excited about it.

So, here's where we're at, currently. A while back, we tore down all the oak paneling on the bottom half of the wall, and then just recently, I started to paint, and that's already made a huge difference. We also took down as much of the oak molding in the room as we could, and over the summer, we plan to replace it all with our own rustic trim. We also need to paint the ceiling once the hardwiring for the ceiling light is taken care of, and probably add some moulding to the ceiling for some visual interest. But soon, it'll be the glorious space we both know it can be.

Get a load of that ceiling fan, and all the sanding dust on our table! Sexy.

*I work for the Williams-Sonoma brand and received a discount on these items.

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