Dining Room Mood Board | Making Joy & Pretty Things

Today, we’re sharing our dining room mood board! Our dining room makeover is in full swing. Here’s a look at our dining room design plans and inspiration.

Finally sharing a long overdue post about our modern dining room makeover design plan!

I’m not going to lie, we’re a lot farther along than this post would indicate. As in, we’re almost done. But half the fun is suspense, right?!?

We moved into our new house at the beginning of June. One of the reasons we fell in love with this house is because of the “morning room”. It’s basically just an extension of the house from the kitchen for the dining room (or, I guess, whatever room you want it to be) that’s filled with windows. It’s just such a bright and happy room.

Except for all the beige and outdated fixtures.

Our Dining Room “Before” Pictures

A bright and sunny dining room area with large windows, french doors, and a large natural wood dining table with chairs and a high chair.

I mean seriously, what is this chandelier?!

A dining room with large windows and doors, beige walls, and natural light. An outdated chandelier hangs over a large natural wood dining table, surrounded by chairs and a baby's high chair.

It’s awful awful awful.

Here’s the room from a few different angles:

Our old dining room before the makeover. Large windows line the beige walls. A large natural wood dining room table with chairs sits under and outdated chandelier. A large dog crate is tucked in the corner of the room.

Yes, we do have a giant dog crate in our dining room. Oh and YES, we do store legos on top of the dog’s crate. Doesn’t everyone?

Another angle of the dining room, looking out into the backyard through the double French doors.

Another angle of our dining room looks out into the backyard through large double hung windows. A large dark wood dining table with bench seats and chairs sits in the middle of the room.

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Dining Room Mood Board & Design Plans

First things first. GOODBYE BEIGE!

I can’t wait to see it go. I think truly ANY color would look nice in this room.

It gets a ton of natural light in the afternoon. So much light that my mother actually wore sunglasses while we were eating dinner in here before ~~(eye roll)~~.

Because of all the windows and guaranteed light, I decided to go with a dark paint color. And no, not just one dark wall like everyone keeps asking 😉

THE.WHOLE.ROOM. Dark.

And, I’m stepping out of my blue/gray color comfort zone and using GREEEEEN! Ever since we painted the dresser-turned-vanity a deep, dark green color for our master bathroom, I’ve been dying to add more green somewhere.

Dining Room Paint Color: North Woods by Behr.

A circular paint sample shows the dining room paint color choice, called North Woods - a deep green with a hint of gray.

North Woods by Behr is such a beautiful deep green shade with just the perfect hint of gray.

With such a dark paint color for the dining room, I knew I had to lighten up the rest of the room, so it didn’t feel like a cave.

Dining Room Furniture from West Elm

I knew I wanted a sleek, modern table and an assortment of chairs. It may seem strange, but I wanted to have two sets of two different chairs and a bench for the kids to sit on. I would prefer to have all chairs, but the kids will ruin upholstered chairs in 3 seconds flat, so bench it is!

I fell in love with this table from West Elm! Coupled with these chairs I knew I had to have and these chairs that really spoke to me in the store. Plus, we snagged all of this at 30% off when they were having a sale. Score!

I really like this mix-and-match look. It feels collected and different.

A light natural wood bench seat from West Elm

A large light natural wood dining room table from West Elm

I really wanted to anchor all of this together with a fun and multi-colored vintage rug. I found a local guy on Facebook Marketplace who gets rugs directly from Iran (which is kinda crazy to me). Though I was half convinced he was going to kidnap us, we ended up getting a seriously amazinggg rug for a great price.

Dining Room Lighting: Natural & Artificial Light

I didn’t know what chandelier I wanted in the room, just that I wanted to it be anything else than what was there.

While we were in West Elm, we saw this one and fell in love! It really wasn’t what I initially had in mind but it worked out great.

A modern chandelier with six oval globe lights attached to black and gold metal chandelier spokes.

Last were the windows! I wanted to get some simple rods that would connect the windows together. Basically, it would look like one long rod from one side of the windows all the way around the room to the end of the other set of windows. Hard to explain but easier to show in pictures soon.

Pottery Barn sells the perfect stuff, so I snagged that up during a sale, too! Here’s a link to the cool connector piece we’re using to connect the two window rods.