It's time for the dining room. Here it is:
Obviously, it comes with wainscoting, although it's some odd bead-board-like wainscoting (maybe closer to paneling, the grooves are several inches apart and unevenly spaced). So it's not a very formal look like some wainscoting. And since it's already painted white, going with natural dark wood is probably not an option. We're going to stick with white.
And while we're looking at this shot, a word needs to be said about the flooring. You can't tell super-well from this photo, but that flooring is light wood, low quality, and definitely recent. It extends into the kitchen, where it's warped from water exposure. It will all have to come out. I would try to match the flooring from the living room (the other adjacent room), which is darker and which appears to be original; or at least convincingly old.
Now, as for the wallpaper, I spent hours on totalwallcovering.com (the prudent thing to do is mentally decorate this entire home while it is under contract to someone else. You understand that, right?) and this one just stuck with me as the right one. See if you agree with me as I go through the other things in the room we'll need to match - oh, and keep in mind that I am determined that this is much more dark yellow than tan:
There are a couple of relevant architectural features in the dining room. First of all, the back of the chimney from the living room fireplace:
I mentioned this with the living room: that brick is not original. As with the living room, I'm inclined to paint it, but with all the wainscoting and all, I'm not inclined to bright white. I was thinking either a "brick" color, like this one,
or maybe that aged-whitewashed-brick effect that you see on the exteriors of old houses sometimes, like so:
I thought that would still give the exposed brick look, but dress up the more contemporary color variations in the brick so they don't stand out so much.
Another fixed detail in the room is this rather charmingly rustic built-in. I am afraid that for all white looks so chic in design photos, throughout this home, the white-painted woodwork just gave me a run-down, grubby feel. It might be because it was actually dirty, but I thought that for this piece, we might be wise to sand it (take out some of the unevenness from the underlying layers of paint) and then paint it low-gloss black. It goes without saying that the back would not be pink - white, cream, light yellow, maybe the dark yellow of the wallpaper, but not pink:
I also think a dark paint color could work well because in the opposite corner (near the exposed brick), I would want to put my mother's corner cabinet, which I will go and fetch from storage when I buy a house. It's kind of a light orange-y wood (German antique I think) that doesn't really go with anything. I was thinking some wax with a darker color could take it a few shades darker (without tampering with its design), and go well with the black.
As for the rest of the items in the room, I have four high-backed dark carved wood chairs (not as ornate as that makes them sound) that were my grandmother's. She claims to have two more, but she's in California, so getting them to the East Coast would be a chore. My mother also has two similar ones that are much lighter wood (living in storage with that corner cabinet), and my memory is a little more fuzzy here, but I believe she has a large (eight-person?) dark wood dining room table, and I think the dining room is an adequate size for that.
Generally, I prefer buffets/sideboards to hutches/china cabinets, but since there's already a tall built-in cupboard and my mom has that tall corner cabinet, I think there's neither room nor need for storage in the form of a buffet.
For the overall feel of the room, in my mind, it comes off reminiscent of this:
Less formal, obviously (just compare the chandeliers!). But I do think I could find space to squeeze in a nice grandfather clock if I really had to.
