Our Vintage Farmhouse Dining Room

Everyone eats in front of the TV these days, don’t they? I know we are guilty of doing this when we are home alone. It could be one of the reasons why there are so many dining tables for sale on Facebook Marketplace too. So why would be want to get rid of a bedroom and create a vintage farmhouse dining room?

What’s wrong with entertaining at our large kitchen island, I hear you say? Nothing at all. In fact, we do it all the time. But for afternoon-long get-togethers, a stool is not the most relaxing thing to sit on. There’s nothing like relaxing around a table, sharing food with family and friends. In this post, you’ll read about our motivation for creating a formal dining area in the farmhouse and how we managed to deck out this entire space on less than $500!

Changing The Living Room to a Dining Room

As I mentioned in the introduction, eating a table is not something that is done a lot anymore. We do have an enormous outdoor table on our verandah and until now we have used that for entertaining. The only problem is, living in Tasmania, the weather is VERY fickle. Four seasons in one day does not describe the gammit of weather we can experience over the course of a couple of hours. So dining outside is not always an option.

This year we were supposed to be having 17 people for Christmas lunch. We have hosted 12 on the verandah but 17 would have required a major rethink of how to seat and protect everyone from the weather, so we decided to bring the dining room indoors.

The original plan was to convert the spare (junk) room into a dining room. Until now, that room had been untouched. The plaster needed fixing, there was a boring, standard 80’s cornice and the paint job was more than a little scary. We are talking a cross between peach and poo brown.

But when we looked at how we would fit a huge table in the room. (I’m talking a minimum of 8 people size) we realised that no table would fit. The room is 4.5m square but we wanted a table that’s 2+ metres long, so you can see our problem. We would never be able to close a door, let alone seat 17 people!

So we thought outside the box. What if we moved our current living room into the unrenovated room and made a ‘snug’ style lounge. It would be warmer in winter, require less heating and still have all the seating for when friends come over.

This is the plan we went with.

How I Furnished our Vintage Farmhouse Dining Room

The first thing I did was create an alert on FB marketplace for old dining tables. I love marketplace. The tip here is to snap up the thing you want as soon as you see it. If it’s a real bargain it will be gone in an hour.

There were so many table options but none were big enough for what we wanted. Then I saw a lovely old cabinet (which we also needed) and in chatting to the girl discovered she had a table and chairs she had not listed. I got them all for $200. They were in very grubby condition, coming from a deceased estate that had been infested by local wildlife and vandals. The owner just wanted them gone. I don’t think she realised they were blackwood and cedar. The chairs are perfect because they’re early 20th century, so in keeping with our farmhouse. They also have the same leg profile as our kitchen dresser. That ties everything together.

After getting the chairs home, I went to our local upholstery place, picked up some vintage Sanderson fabric for $10 and a staple gun for $70, and redid the chairs. The most expensive part of the makeover was the pushpins around the seatbacks. They cost $5 a packet and I used 4. My upholstery skills are by no means perfect but I’m happy with the finished look. To save money, I used wadding from a flattened cushion as the back padding on the chairs.

I also cleaned the table down and gave it a good dose of O-Cedar Furniture Polish to take out the surface scratches on the top. I love the legs. This ornate style of leg really appeals to me.

To finish the decorating, I added the birdhouse to the fireplace. It cost me $40, the round clock was $180 and the rectangular one was a clearance item at bunnings a couple of years ago. It cost me $15. I sprayed it with Rustoleum Old Gold spray paint to suit our decor. The elm Windsor chair is an antique I got at an auction for $160. They are very hard to find here and are worth around $1800!

The Plan Now

So our plan for large gatherings now, is to seat 8 at this table and when we have more we can add our smaller table to the end and cover with one long cloth. We are not having the huge gathering we expected becuase of Covid restrictions changing (again) but next Easter we will definitley be entertaining that large group!

Do you like out new dining area?