Townhouse Dining Area and Kitchen Before and After

I am excited to share with you the townhouse dining area and kitchen before and after in the Love Your Neighbor design house for Habitat for Humanity. I always love doing these houses because it means were doing something special for somebody. I you haven’t been familiar with it, I work with a charity that goes to Habitat for Humanity and other homes and we pre-furnish the home for the new homeowner. Normally I pick a room or two to design. The last time I had a lower level family room and a playroom. This time I have a kitchen/dining room townhouse combo which means I have a fun townhouse dining area and kitchen before and after to share with you. While I love designing all kinds of homes, I love the challenge of homes with cozier spaces, because everything needs to have a purpose in a smaller space.

I have a video walk-through you can take below and then continue onto the pictures for a closer look.

The new homeowners love a more modern boho planty style with blue and white, and I wanted to emulate that. Most of our furnishings are donated with some new added in, so it adds the extra challenge of “working with what you got”.

I started in the dining room by figuring out a layout. You can see in this post about the home I had a few options, but I really wanted to pick one that had the best flow and aesthetic.

Ultimately I decided to turn the table lengthwise in the room, and put a sofa table up against the window so the room had more space to walk around it. They woudl also be able to add a chair on each end for more seating if needed. And I liked that there was a little ambience by having a lamp in the window. I added some fun books (I found a great one that is an old real estate book that says Chicago on it), to the sofa table with a cute little lamp, and some faux plants.

I found these great dark blue velvet drapes at IKEA. Since the table was donated, I recovered the chairs to match the drapes.

You can see here how I made this little hanging plant wall so that when she looks through the kitchen from the dining room not only does she get these cute hanging kokedama balls form Ikea, but it’s almost like looking out a kitchen window.