Dining Room Makeover

we have been in our apartment for a little over 2 years now and our "dining room" has been a big ole mess.  when we moved to birmingham, my mom gave me her old french provincial dining table (which she gave me permission to paint). i was obsessed with this picture of a dining room in domino and wanted to recreate that bold look without it being my wall color. i went with a bold turquoise-y blue but unfortunately against our gray wall (too dark to be paired with bold) and the rest of the walls being cream (apartments - blah), it was a disaster. but i thought i would wait til we moved out to repaint it. well, i got impatient. and decided to re-do it a couple of weeks ago. i chose a mint-y color that i love (it's martha stewart but i lost the swatch). it's so much more calming...

the project also included some windsor dining room chairs that my sister had given me when they moved to memphis. in the above picture, they are the color that she had painted them in college, and i initially painted them a midnight/titan color (which just further added to the horrible clashing of blue and gray). i love mint and black so i went with black for the accent chairs and then - because i am obsessed with this look - i decided to spray paint the end of the legs with a metallic gold spray paint. i love the way it all turned out.

total cost: about $15

IKEA Nightstands

i love making things my own. i love to take old things and make them new (just ask david...he has issues with how much i paint old funiture). so especially for him, the idea of buying something brand new and then changing it didn't make much sense. (i have very specific ideas in my head that i can rarely find in the real world - this is the single reason almost everything with our wedding went horribly wrong. but that's a whole "what not to do" book.) well, that was a month ago. then, we were so sick of not having nightstands and we realized there were better things to do with our money than buy a whole new bed on top of everything else we have going on right now.

so sunday we went to ikea and bought some basic nightstands. BUT then we went to anthropologie (ahhhh, my sanctuary) and we picked out new knobs. david got to pick his own...an awesome black and ivory one that still looks manly. and i picked out mine. now we have nightstands that are unique to us. 

i know that probably sounds lame to some people but rarely do i find something in the condition that it is going to stay in. i like it to look different. i like it to look like me. so we took this:

and turned it into these:

can you guess which side of the bed is mine? hmmm.