Some of you have been following along {remember this post? and this one?} as I figure out how to best utilize my dining room. I want it to be pretty and functional, and as the only place to put a table in our home, I can’t turn it into a full-time office/playroom, but since we don’t have an office/playroom, this one rooms serves as all three, often simultaneously.

Over the Christmas break, we made a trip to Ikea for one of their oh-so-wonderful Expedit shelving units. We took down the Pottery Barn wine shelves that have lived in the corner for five years. The space looked like this for a while:

Keep in mind that it’s not always sunny and beautiful when we tackle projects around here. Some of the in progress pictures are dark and grainy or yellow-ish. I never claimed to be a photographer and you still get the idea, right?

Said wine shelves were perched on top of the shelving unit for a while as we were trying to decide whether to hang them somewhere else or not. Then, I started organizing the shelves to house some of Molly’s toys and some of my SBN/Junior League/teaching stuff that I use almost every day.

I love the white bins I found at Target {bottom cubes} and the file box from Container Store. Don’t fret – you’re not missing anything fun on top. The wine shelves are still there. But then I snagged two more white bins at Target and was hosting a Junior League meeting at my house, so now the shelves look like this:

Obviously we’re going to repaint to cover up the patches from taking down the wine shelves and I still have some styling to do to make everything as pretty and functional as I desire, but overall, I think it’s coming along well! The bins are plenty roomy for a lot of Molly’s toys and I love having my work stuff so accessible {as in, not moving around piles of stuff and pulling on overstuffed drawers!}. The best part is, it doesn’t take up more room than what we had there previously.

The only problem is figuring out where to store the wine glasses that used to be on the shelves. Oh, what problems we face, right?

And, for even more fun, I found some pretty dupioni silk drapes that I wanted to give a whirl, so I bought them and then sweetly asked Jim to hang the rod for me.

Before:

After:

I’m trying to decide if I’m going to hang the same panels on the other window, behind the huntboard or find a coordinating roman shade. I’m leaning toward the curtains, but need to see some pictures of curtains behind furniture before I decide. Send some my way, if you come across any!

Slowly but surely, we are figuring out this space and making it work for us!