Dining Room / Office Progress

Happy Saturday Everyone!

I am prepping my apartment to host an intimate holiday dinner for a few friends and I need to update my dining room. 

I haven't invested anytime nor money in my dining room in about three years, which is a sufficient amount of time for me to gather inspiration for the space. Here is my dining room as of yesterday, via my iPhone.

I have already started with a few things such as hanging grass cloth wallpaper.

If you remember a few blog post back, well it was more than a few blog post back maybe over year ago. Anyway, I found about 10 rolls of grass cloth wallpaper for about $2 to $3 dollars a roll and I bought all of them. I wasn't going to use the wallpaper until I moved into my own home but seeing as how I'm really not interested in purchasing my own home right now I decided to go ahead and use the grass cloth wallpaper in as many rooms as I possibly could and see what new life I can breathe into this apartment.

I am not embarrassed, but as you can see it is a hot mess in here. This dining area will serve both dining as well as my workspace. I dont want to put any storage in here as a way of keep as much real-estate as I possibly can, but I am going to play around with a few layouts and see what I can squeeze in.

Hanging wallpaper is extremely difficult  and I would not advise anyone to do it but, because I'm not really striving for extreme perfection here, I decided to go ahead and hanging it myself. I'm not using paste, but rather push pins I bought from Dollar Tree. 

As you can see there are a lot of standards in this space such as the brass chandelier, this neutral carpet and cabinetry. There isn't much I can do about those elements, so I am going to just go with them and add a few elements to make them look better. 

I have been saving various dining rooms on Pinterest and other places and I think I know exactly how I want my dining room to look. Of course my go to color scheme is black gray with touches of gold and chrome. Since I am still renting there isn't much that I can do by way of light fixtures wall colors,  but I have a lot of easy solutions that I am going to try out.

Here are a few images from my inspiration room.

The major elements in this room are the black leather nailhead dining chairs and the table. Unfortunately, these type chairs are difficult to source at an affordable price from a big box home store. I am hoping to stumble upon some very similar at HomeGoods or TJMaxx. I have seen a few black fabric nail head chairs, but they were either patterned or the back was very low. 

I am excited about decorating for the holidays, but I need to get the bases covered first. Today I am going to buy sample paint to paint the grasscloth. Although I like the color of the natural grasscloth, it isn't what I'm going for in the dining area. I am also going to pop into a few stores to get a head start on my holiday decorating. Have you start trimming for the season?