In Our Dining Room

Vintage dining table and chairs
Structube console
Hudson’s Bay lamp
Structube rug
Ikea curtains
Spiegelau wine glasses
Vintage vase
Academy Florist bouquet
Chapters Indigo picture frames
The Girl # 1 by Ospre Studio
Libra by Jenni Haikonen
Verde plant pot
Verde watering can
Vancouver Candle Co. The North candle
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Welcome to our dining room! I’ve been looking forward to sharing our home with you all since we moved in a year ago. We’ve lived together for over a decade, but our Winnipeg apartment is the first we’ve had the luxury of choosing based on considerations other than, “Can we afford the monthly payments?” And there’s no denying that makes it pretty special. But, knowing that we have particular tastes and would likely make a lot of changes to anywhere we lived, we also chose an apartment that needed a lot of updating. Our home has great bones, but it had a distinctly old lady chic vibe when we bought it. The space was well loved but seriously dated. Think beige carpets, pink bathroom tile and laminate cabinets in the kitchen.

In a year, we’ve made a lot of changes to our new home – including tearing up every square inch of carpet to reveal the gorgeous hardwood hiding underneath. But our apartment remains a work in progress. We’ve scheduled a complete kitchen renovation later this year. We need to replace doors and light fixtures. All of them. And we are still slowly acquiring furniture as we find pieces we love; our current home is twice the size of anywhere else we’ve ever lived and there is still a lot of empty space because I refuse to settle for pieces I don’t adore. That said, we did recently finalise one room: the dining room.

The dining room is the last room I expected to finish quickly. We didn’t even own a dining table until we moved into this apartment, and the one we have now came with the place…! But we love it – it’s a vintage seventies design from Scandinavia, so we were lucky to be able to include it in our purchase. It looked totally different with the previous owners’ decor, but we’ve been able to integrate it easily with our much more modern aesthetic.

Almost everything else in the room was a lucky find – the right piece just appeared at the right moment. We spied the console at Structube while looking for a bed and ordered it right away. What will we really do with a console, I wondered at the time. But its proven to be my favourite thing I never knew I needed. (The interior storage is so practical!) The lamp appeared on the cover of a Hudson’s Bay flyer that I saw at my parents’. We bought it the same weekend and waited weeks for delivery – totally worth it. And, perhaps best of all, the rug, which I bought solely because it was on clearance. I’ll find somewhere to put it, I reasoned – because I can rationalise anything. But I did find somewhere to put it, and I feel like it pulls the whole room together.

We still have so much work to do in our home that sometimes it feels like a project we’ll never be able to finish. But whenever I step into the dining room, I remember that things do and will come together. Maybe not on the exact timeline I want, it’s true – but they will, and in the end, it will be worth the wait.

Right now, I’m hard at work turning my office into a cohesive space and, with any luck, I’ll be able to share the results soon. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your home decorating stories! Please share. Happy Wednesday!