Home Tour – The Dining Room

Every week I’m going to be guiding you lovely lot through my home, Baylyn House in Christchurch, Dorset. People that follow me on Instagram will know this house like the back of their hand by now BUT I still have a few room’s which haven’t quite made the cut until now. I bet you are all quaking with excitement right…

This week’s room is our ‘official’ dining room which isn’t actually used that often, especially now we have our beautiful bench seating area in the conservatory (‘how to’ post on that coming up soon!).

This room is located at the front right hand side of our detached double fronted Victorian house. It is one of my favourites with a lovely warm tranquil cosy feel to it, as well as lots of character from the original stained glass bay windows to the stunning (once the children are older but for now is lit by fairy lights only) working fireplace.

People that have been following me for a while will know that we moved into Baylyn House when I was 34 weeks pregnant with Rory. He came 5 weeks later, during that time we had decorated the majority of the house including this room. I also had shutters on order however they took a whopping 9 weeks to be delivered/fitted (I’ve never had to wait so patiently for anything before….but they are SO worth it). 

Below is a ‘before’ picture of the room –

The paint colour in this room is Wilkinsons (yes, good old Wilko’s actually sell paint, and its actually pretty damn good as well as being an absolute bargain) in colour ‘Coastline’. We actually used this paint in our old house and loved it so much we decided to reuse it here. It is a lovely warm colour without being too dark. This is also the colour of our bedroom upstairs.

The dining table & chairs were a Gumtree find as well as the window bench, all were very unloved but with the help of Annie Sloan (I use ‘Old White’ on all my upcycles which is a warmer white) and some basic upholstery skills they were transformed. I do this with a lot of furniture which saves a fortune as well as giving that character ‘shabby chic’ look. I find AS paint so easy to use as no prep work is needed. Look at the state of that chair yuckkkk!

The two dressers are Ikea Hemnes range (£250 each) in white. I’ve decorated one with lots of our wedding keepsakes including my bouquet. The other dresser houses my Nan’s poppy tea set which holds great sentimental value.

The focal point of the room is a huge vase with artificial hydrangeas, both from Neptune Home – if you haven’t checked them out before then seriously, you haven’t lived. I live near one of their showrooms and could spend days wondering around daydreaming about buying every single item in there, but I’d need to remortgage the house a thousand times over to afford to do so. The whole arrangement cost £170.