Dining Room Paint & Purchases | ORC Week 3

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Last Updated on January 12, 2021 by lindseymahoney

Week 3 of the One Room Challenge brought on the biggest transformation yet. I say this all the time and I will say it again…PAINT IS SO TRANSFORMATIVE!

I spent this last week wrapping up wall prep (filling holes, sanding the walls, etc), making some purchases for our dining room and last night I got to paint the entire space & install my new light fixture.

If this is your first visit to my blog, welcome! To give you a little background on this post, I am participating in the Better Homes & Gardens One Room Challenge and have chosen to renovate my dining room in just 6 weeks. Check out week 1 and week 2 to see my dining room design plans and renovation progress.

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Before we review week 3, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane….

First Week:

Second Week:

Third Week:

Gahhh I love a good before and after! Anyone else?! I find that looking at progress pictures helps to motivate me to keep moving and complete a project.

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Week 3 Progress:

Dining Room Purchases

Last week I started having second thoughts on the original chandelier I had chosen for my ORC mood board. While this is a formal dining room, it is also the main eating area for my family and I did NOT want it to feel “stuffy”. After talking it over with a few friends I decided to pivot and go with a more modern chandelier.

There were so many great options! I narrowed it down to 4 of my favorite lights and asked my Instagram friends to weigh in on their favorite.

I was leaning heavily toward #3 and that ended up being the least popular of the votes! The Instagram favorite was #4 and the more I looked at it the more I liked it. I decided to go with the majority and make the purchase.

Light Fixture Instagram Results

Along with the light fixture, I purchased the dining room chairs and window treatments for the dining room. I love the black contrast of the chairs with the light wood table. Week 4 I need to focus on finding artwork for the walls and ordering a rug! If I am going to order online I have to do it soon for it to get here in time!

Painting the Dining Room

The main priority for this week was to get the walls painted. Once the walls were prepped and as smooth as could get them, I started on the paint.

Whenever I paint a room, I work from top to bottom and from light to dark. This means I start on the ceiling and try to paint the lightest paint colors in the space first.

For the dining room, I painted the crown molding and the lower half of the chair rail a bright white and painted the upper wall a dark gray. The order that I painted was ceiling – crown molding – below the chair rail – walls.

To achieve a crisp paint line at the chair rail and on the floor, I used Frogtape and it worked like a charm.

The dark gray wall color is the same color that is on our kitchen island. Sprinkling the same color throughout the rooms in your home will make it feel more cohesive. I had Sherwin Williams do a custom color match using a cabinet door to get the exact same color.

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Thats all for week 3, be sure to check back in next week and see all of the progress made in week 4! I will be working on a fun DIY project and figuring out all of the pretty stuff to add back into the space!

P.S. Don’t forget to check out the progress from all of the other OCR participants on the One Room Challenge blog!