Apartment Tour: Dining Room

It’s week 2 of the Apartment Tour, and as promised, here is the world’s cutest dining table. Seriously. It’s adorable.

Retro Red Formica Kitchen Table

It called to me one day when I was listing furniture on FB Marketplace and I.could.not.resist. The joys and dangers of being able to make your own design decisions are that you might end up with an original cherry red formica table sitting in your house as you get rid of everything around it in preparation for downsizing.

No regrets.

I LOVE this table. I’ll post more pictures on Instagram and Facebook this week and talk about the different steps I experimented with to bring her back to shining glory, because she is so adorable she needed her own photo shoot. 

On to the rest of the Dining Room Design!

Storage was key here to make both the kitchen and dining room work. I had measured ahead of time and was pretty sure three of the Ikea Hejne shelving sets from my old basement would fit well across the back wall of my new dining room, but I was still a little nervous when it came time to actually assemble them.

They are within a half inch of the molding on either side!!! so perfect! It’s like they’re made for the little nook here. I was positively giddy when we slid it into place.

It’s taken me arranging and rearranging a few times in order to find a placement that fits my “functional, but make it pretty” aesthetic, but it’s getting there. 

As with most of my spaces, lighting and plants are my biggest go-to for making things pretty. I added an antique red lamp (passed down to my kids from their great grand-parents) and put it on the same remote as the kitchen ambient light, so I can easily turn them all on/off at once. The white bins really streamline what could be a cluttered look and are currently taming everything from snacks to canned goods, and less frequently used baking tools and pans. They are a mix of Ikea and Bed Bath and Beyond, which are nearly identical, other than the handle shape, which is low key driving me insane. My next step will be labelling everything, but I’m waiting to see if my arrangement sticks, especially though the addition of more back-to-school snack storage. I’m past the climbing toddler stage, so I didn’t even bracket the shelves to the wall, making this freestanding unit a totally rental-friendly storage solution for us. 

My other favorite rental-friendly find for this space were the curtain rods. Nothing warms up a space like curtains, but I’m trying to avoid a day full of patching holes from molly screws when we move, so I went hunting for non-traditional curtain hanging options. I found some hardware that hang from existing blind mounts (which I used in another room) and some that tension mount inside a window opening, but I really wanted to maximize the width of the window opening here, so I wanted something I could hang wider than the window.

Enter the “Easy Install” curtain rod. They hang with two little nails per bracket, so I can hang them anywhere I want, without needing buckets of spackle when they come down. About the easiest curtain installation I’ve ever had. I’m a happy girl. I found mine on Amazon, but I’ve also seen “Fast Fit” easy install brackets from Walmart, which seem to be about the same thing.

I gave the dated chandelier a quick, free, mini make-under (before and after pictures to come on Instagram and Facebook) and everything else was repurposed from other spaces in my house, which helped balance out the cost of the room, after buying the table, curtain rods and storage boxes. 

I’m loving how the storage shelves make the kitchen and dining room functional, while giving me a place to display some sentimental treasures, like my daughter’s New Better Homes and Garden’s Cookbook, displayed next to her great-grandmother’s vintage Betty Crocker cookbook, bridged with the rolling pin my mother gave me, and several generations of pyrex. 

Functional, but make it pretty. And sentimental. 

What are your favorite kitchen/dining room storage solutions in your spaces, or that you’ve seen someone else use? I’d love to hear!

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