I think our dining room is my favorite room in our home!  Our old dining room set was a counter height 60″ square table with an espresso finish.  In our old house it fit perfectly in our square dining room but when we bought this house I knew it wouldn’t work in our very long (20 foot) dining room so we sold it on Craigslist.

Side bar: how great is Craigslist?! We actually ended up selling quite a few furniture items before we moved and every one of our buyers was awesome, just really friendly, cool people.  I’m glad our gently used furniture could go to great homes!

I get most of our furniture from Gardiners Furniture and I had been eyeing up this particular farmhouse style rustic table for a few months.  I thought it would tie in well with our farmhouse sink and the sort of rustic/coastal/calming vibe I am trying to create in our home.  Chairs were a tougher decision.  Gavin wanted to go with wood because they wouldn’t stain easily (we do have an almost 2-yr old son) but I wanted to go with linen.   Even though the Parson’s chairs weren’t Gavin’s first pick, I think he would agree they nicely compliment the table.  I also purchased the flat-weave striped rug at Gardiners, the chandelier (a bit of a splurge but totally worth it!) and the mirror are from Pottery Barn.  The antique map print was picked up at Su Casa and then custom-framed at Michaels.  We choose to paint our dining room Wedgewood Gray by Benjamin Moore and I really like it even though it’s a little more blue than I originally anticipated.

Since our kitchen is on the smaller side, we really needed some extra storage space.  We also wanted a server or some type of buffet in the dining room so we decided to do custom built-ins across the back wall.  The cabinet part is completed and came out beautifully, Gavin built-in a spot for our wine fridge and used butcher’s block top from Ikea to create our “buffet”.   Doors will be added to hide all our junk at some point but right now I’m just happy to have the additional storage space!  Gavin also removed a door and created an open doorway between our kitchen and dining room.

Here’s the before pictures:

Here’s our current dining room:

In this shot you can see the full room with the built-in cabinetry.  At this point, without the doors, it looks really busy since you can see all of our stuff in there but once the doors are on it will be gorgeous: