Our dining 'room' is probably the one room in our house that has the most dramatic before and afters...mostly because it's the only one I remembered to actually take pictures of at every step along the way. I did a post similar to this a few months ago, but it's changed a little more sense then, so I'll recap and show the most recent pictures here. If you're a regular reader, I apologize for the monotony. ;)
This scary empty space...
is what our dining area looked like a few days after we moved into this house about a year ago. Now, if we owned instead of rented, I would have painted below the chair rail all white, (still considering it, do you think our landlords would notice?), and put some snazzy wallpaper above the chair rail. But, seeing as it actually is a rental I've had to try and be a little more creative than that.
First step add some shades to those exposed lightbulbs on the chandelier...
We got lucky and got them for 80% off at a Restoration Hardware that was going out of business! Score! And yet, the dining area was still super boring and white, with nothing but an ugly oak table that someone gave us for free right after we got married. Yawn...
Next up was the addition of dropcloth drapes, which I think made a huge difference!
By Christmas we'd also added an old rug that had been in our living room at our apartment, and a console table from Target that floats around our house as desk, console table, sofa table, whatever I feel like it would be best used as at the moment. Still pretty boring though.
In January we got to work refinishing the chairs to change them from ugly 90's oak to black:
From Christmas to spring the dining area saw very little change until one day I decided to move the lamps that had always been on our nightstands in the master bedroom into the dining area, move a Pier 1 sunburst mirror from above the fireplace, and add some white plates to the wall.
Before we hosted our first Easter dinner away from family and with some of our friends, I found some silver candlesticks, my favorite silver M, some white vases from clearance at Target around the house and arranged them on the console table, and bought a palm from Lowes for the corner to brighten up all the white.
The rest of the dining area at Easter...
As much as I LOVE white, I thought the Easter pictures looked a little too white, so I took off the long white chair slipcovers, and this is more what the table looked like everyday. These pictures were taken in May of this year.
In July I thought the dining area needed a little contrast, so I took a poll (here) and the consensus was in favor of switching the white lampshades out for black.
I still have the white ones in case I decide to switch them back at some point, but for now I'm really loving the black.
In the intrest of adding some more color to the room, I also changed out the drop cloth drapes for ones I made in this fabric:
Waverly Rustic Navy Toile. I majorly heart the toile. With the addition of the toile the old green rug did not go in the room anymore and was therefore banished to our bedroom, (it can be seen here). I'm still on the hunt for a new rug, I'm thinking this one from Pottery Barn.
What do you think? I'm definitely open for suggestions if you've seen anything that would look better.
So that's the status of our dining room as of now. I'm sure you noticed the once beautiful palm in the corner progressively dying throughout the pictures. I was hoping it would make it to Christmas when I could replace it with a tree, but I don't think it's going to make it. My black thumb strikes again! I've heard that Home Depot gives a 1 year warranty on house plants, so I'm going to check into that and if it's true, after Christmas I'll get a new pretty plant from there. ;)
I'm also planning on balancing the plates on the right side of the mirror out with some more, but I've been buying them at TJ Maxx, Home Goods, Marshalls type stores and I get them as I find them, so it's a process.
To recap, because I know everyone loves a before and after. Here's our dining room when we moved in versus it's status as of two weeks ago, almost exactly a year later:
Jennifer
that we got as a wedding gift in 2006, and it's great! 
