Let me just tell you, there are so many good reasons for me not to decorate my dining room at all this Fall.
-The floors look really bad next to my nice old rescued wood floors in the front hall. And that makes me a little crazy.
-The walls are still a weird turquoisy color that I just can’t really like no matter how hard I try, but there’s no point in painting until we re-drywall the whole room. And that may not happen for… I don’t know… another five years? Or more? And that makes me a little crazy.
-I broke the office-style tile ceiling in the summer when I was trying to hang a big lantern from it so it droops, but it doesn’t really matter because the whole ceiling needs to come out, be raised up to original height and be re-done. And that makes me a little crazy.
The thing is though, it’s the first room I see when I get up in the morning and it was looking pretty sad after all the Summer decorations had been put away. So I added in a few simple hints of Fall, just to make it feel a little happier in there for now.
Oh, and this post should really be subtitled “….and then I added more burlap”, cause that was my solution to pretty much everything in here.
But it worked!
OK, so now you see what I mean about the burlap!
I used it as a table cloth….
And a lantern filler…
and I fluffed a bit up and made a runner for the sideboard/buffet/whatchamacallit back there too.
The wheaty looking stuff came from down by the creek. Not many wild flowers out there like there were last year at this time.
I admit I may have gotten a little bit whimsical on this buffet here. I really had no plans for this room, so I just went with whatever felt right at the time!
I think this table runner belonged to my great grandma. I think she made it? Maybe? I’ve been wanting to use it for Fall for a few years, but I couldn’t figure out how exactly to make it work. I like this little clothesline set up I fixed up for it here.
This side table seemed lonely over in a corner so it got the burlap treatment and some rocks. Oh, but they’re fancy rocks! See? They’re under glass so they must be!
They make me laugh.
This dresser got a little pumpkin stack with a ceramic vase pumpkin on the bottom and a spray-painted dollar store pumpkin on top.
So that’s our dining room this Fall! Just a go-with-the-flow, use-whatever-you-have-around bit of Fall cheer for ya.
And the best part? I didn’t even make myself crazy over it.
Well, maybe just a little. The walls are still turquoise.
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.