Give your dining room an instant makeover

Think your dining room is too small, dark, or outdated to be renovated on a budget? think again! Follow these simple tips and tricks to give your dining room an instant makeover – without breaking the bank. From doing a timber feature wall to updating an old table, we’ve got you covered. So get ready to diy your way to a beautiful new dining space!

Our dining space features in so many of my tablescapes and decor pictures that I was getting a little sick of it!!! I started to look around to find some easy ways to update it.

Don’t get me wrong I love my dining room and it serves us well on a daily basis. It has been the site of many great dinners and family gatherings. I just wanted to show it some love too.

The easy ways to update a dining space

We have several ideas to add a little bit of interest to this space:-

• The first one is VJ board added to the wall behind the glass cabinet.
• Painting the glass cabinet a deep navy is next on the agenda.
• Thirdly painting the legs and apron of the large table white and sanding down the top.
• Giving the lattice fronted cupboard a makeover

First steps in the update

Removing all my crystal vases and teacups from the glass cabinet was the first step. There is a lot but in my defence I do use them all in my tablescapes and for entertaining. Finding the right navy was difficult. I wanted it to be a dark navy rather than a royal blue. the colour I chose was was Copen Blue from Haymes Paint.

Once the cabinet was cleaned out I did a light sand and then applied four coats of paint. When you are going from light to dark it can take more coats than normal.

Second update

The second update was to sand and paint the long table. We also decided to add some trim to the tops of the legs to add more interest. Tony made this table and it has been the scene of many a fun gathering with both family and friends so we really wanted to keep it. It may not be exactly our style now but hopefully the small changes we make will help with that. We used Jolie chalk paint in Pure White.

Third update

We have owned the beautiful lattice fronted cabinet for many years and I love it but I wanted to update its look a little bit.

I started by sanding the cabinet down but quickly realised sanding would not work for the lattice sections. Enter the oven cleaner method. I had tried this before without much success so I was very nervous to try it on this beautiful piece.

The major change in the dining room makeover

The major change we wanted to make was to dining room wall. We hoped the addition of vertical shiplap will give the room a little character and the illusion of height. Unfortunately timber supplies have become very expensive and hard to source. The solution was for Tony to make it just like he did for the living room cabinets and the office wall. If you want to see the process have a look at the living room cabinets blog post. We had previously done a ship lap wall in our window seat so we wanted to keep the same width for this wall.

The finished dining space

Tony and I couldn’t be happier with how this space came together. The great thing was that putting it together came when Tony had tested positive for Covid so we were in quarantine. This meant that I had to shop my home to decorate the space. I found this experience really liberating repurposing old decor items felt right for this room.

I hope we showed you how it’s possible to give your dining room an instant makeover – without breaking the bank. We did it without spending much money other than the timber for the wall which was very inexpensive because we made our own shiplap. There was also some paint purchased for they navy cabinet. We already had all other supplies.

If you’re after some more inspiration check out our living room renovation here.

Let me know if you have made any changes to your own dining space.