The dining room dilemma

The dining room is the first room you see when you come to visit us here at the house of Crackers and quite frankly it's pretty uninspiring. The walls are a golden tan color, the floors are a honey stained wood and the dining room set is also a light golden hue. Even the fabric on the dining chairs is a solid color in the tan/gold family.


The only bits of color in the room are an area rug (whose primary colors are...you guessed it gold and brown with some bits of red & green), the curtains (which are red & gold plaid - Mr. Crackers thinks they look like they belong in a Harry Potter movie) and a mirror and hutch which are both painted a barn red.



I had been trying to think of something inexpensive to give the space some color without making it too dark. Usually when faced with this problem my first instinct is to paint, but since I wasn't sure what color to use, I had been mulling over some other options. A couple of months ago, it occurred to me that if I could recover the chairs it would be a really easy (and cheap) way to refresh the whole space.

So, last week I ventured to a local fabric store with my Mom and the paint swatches for the walls and the red hutch to see what I could do about giving the room a new look. I found a fabric that I really liked that matched my paint colors & ever better, fit into my budget.

Ta da...

I really thought it was pretty. I was bold and looked really good against the light wood and walls. I was really proud of myself - I was going to make a dramatic impact in a room and pull everything together for under $100.00. Wahoo!

Except, that once I started recovering the chairs, I noticed something. You see, while the fabric looked great against the walls and really set off the honey color of the furniture, it did not really match the carpet... at all. It turns out that the red in the carpet was not really the same red that the hutch & the mirror were painted and um... the brown in the background of the fabric is completely different than the brown in the carpet. Ooops!

Not only that, but it seems that the pattern I chose for the chairs doesn't really work well with the pattern in the carpet. In fact, they kind of fight each other for your attention.

Unfortunately, the room which was so boring that it was putting me to sleep is now filled with so many competing patterns that it is starting to give Mr. Crackers a headache (Sorry Mr. Crackers, I had forgotten about the patterned couch in the sitting room, oops.)

This picture doesn't quite illustrate the cacophony of pattern that assaults your eye when you come into the room. But trust me...it's a lot to take in.

So now Mr. Crackers & I are talking about either replacing the carpet (which would be significantly more than my $50.00 budget for re-decorating this room) or replacing the Harry Potter curtains (a far more likely scenario that is not nearly as budget crushing as getting a new rug.)

Oh well, I guess I won't send in my audition tape for HGTV's Design Star this year.