Dining Room DIY

Apartment living. Oh, the joy! It's hard to get settled into a place when you know it's going to be temporary. Being newlyweds, Scratch and I wanted to make our apartment feel like home without investing a ton of money. So off we went to thrift shops to find some unique items to furnish our new home.

We found a dining table right away at a place called MacAlpine's Soda Fountain. Here you can get lunch and shop for antiques! Strange combo, right? What started out as a $400 dining set, turned into a $100 table. The next obstacle would not be as easy, finding chairs. Don't judge a book by it's cover when antiquing, you never know what has potential under the rough exterior. That's the case for the chairs we found. All four iron chairs were purchased for a "steel" of $80. Not bad!


These chairs definitely needed some TLC as they were kind of rusted and the color of ... metal. We figured out our color scheme, went to Home Depot, Hobby Lobby, and got to work. 1 - Scrub, scrub, scrub. Armed with latex gloves, steel wool, and some elbow grease, we cleaned the iron. 2 - With a damp cloth we washed the dust from the chairs. 3 - One coat of white spray paint primer (Krylon $7). 4 - Two coats of colored spray paint (Krylon $24). 5 - One clear coat (Rust-oleum $4). 6 - Felt bottoms for the feet ($1). 7 - Chair cushions from Amazon ($60).

This is my favorite space in our little home. Pinterest gave us the idea for the plates on the wall ($30) which were purchased from Goodwill. The centerpiece on our table from TJ Maxx is suppose to be a planter, but we use it as a fruit bowl ($15). Total investment: $321.