More Art in the Dining Room

OCTOBER.  It's October.  Who can believe that?

This project was long overdue and made such a huge difference when complete: I -- gasp! -- hung stuff on the wall.  Although, in this case, I managed to create a little artwork too!  

My dining room is one big room with the living room. It's also got a really long wall that has confounded me - I didn't want to overwhelm the space with tons of stuff on the wall, but it definitely needed more than what I had up there.  I also felt the wall over the buffet needed something.  The mirror looked good but I felt that it could use something more.

Here it is after a little work!

Easy one first: the buffet.  I found a set of three mirrors at Target months ago (like around Christmas) and picked them up. They've been waiting patiently to be hung up in the house.  Initially, I thought I would use all of them in my stairwell, but I realized it would work better to use two in the dining room flanking the mirror.  I still have one left, and that one will definitely go in the stairwell among the art and frames.  But here are the two matching mirrors now:

The addition of the mirrors makes that corner so much lighter!

Now for the long wall.  I didn't want to take away from the pretty prints in my oversized frames.  So whatever I used had to work, and not compete, with those.  I settled on two pieces: (1) a gold LOVE print from Made By Girl (I really love this print - it's in Little's rooms and I bought one for the old house) and (2) I made my own watercolor art!  That's right.  I made my own art. 

First up: the LOVE print.  The LOVE print was easy: I just popped it in an IKEA Ribba frame, a white one, of course.  Done.  Made By Girl's prints are all designed to fit nicely inside IKEA frames.

The watercolor art was also easy. I saw the piece (and followed the tutorial) on Style Me Pretty and it seemed simple enough.  It was!  I really liked how soft the colors were and how it brought in more of the gold, which I have peppered throughout the space in the LOVE print, in the candleholders and even in my little upholstered bench/coffee table.  Anyway, I bought a canvas at Michaels and just followed the tutorial in the SMP blog.   All in all, it cost very little (probably about $25 for all the supplies and the huge canvas, which I scored for 50% off thanks to a sale) and took an hour or so. 

Yay!  Instant gratification!  This room is looking so good, though I really want to get a rug for under the dining room table to break up the not so wonderful grey carpet.  Rug aside, all that's left is to refinish the dining room table.  As you can see, it's a sort of reddish wood right now.

I love the look of the table but not the color. At all.  So I am debating whether to do a dark stain on top and paint the legs white like this:

Or do a more pickled top and paint the legs white like this:

via

Or just paint the entire thing white:

via

Any suggestions?  At the very least, I think I will strip the finish off the top, just to see how that looks. And then either stain or paint it.  But the legs are definitely going white!

See you swoon,