Unless you’ve designed and built it yourself, it can take some time for a home you’ve recently moved into — especially a rental — to feel like your personal space. Designer and DIYer Alex Hinand (@the_bareback_contessa_) says it’ll take a year at least.
For example, he had to paint his dining room three times before it became the signature dark green stunner it is today. Alex’s dining room boasts a bay window on the left-hand side, which sold him on his home, and because the room gets gorgeous natural light, adding a darker color to the walls, ceiling, and trim around didn’t make the living room feel too dark. In fact, it’s one of his favorite elements in his home.
The DIYer has great advice for color drenching a room.
Alex selected a forest green (Benjamin Moore’s Vintage Vogue) and shared his advice for painting an entire room on Instagram — after all, he’s done it several times in this room alone. First, take time to prep the entire room for paint at the beginning, like patching, moving furniture, and taking off your outlet covers. Don’t do it wall to wall as you go. “You won’t be interrupted by having to move another table or tape another wall,” he says.
He also recommends cutting in the corners and ceiling first because they’re the most difficult part and you’ll have more care for precision at the beginning of your process.
Third, buy more paint than you think you’ll need. (His room transformation took just over a gallon of paint.) “If I hadn’t gotten the second gallon, I know it would have taken me months to get back to finishing the paint job,” he says. “Nothing is more frustrating than running out of paint in the middle of your flow, plus you will have extra when you invariably need a touch-up.”
Wall-to-wall shelving makes great use of the space.
Opposite the window wall, Alex added three Nathan James bookshelves, and the colorful dining chairs can be found at Lowe’s. Mostly, though, Alex recommends shopping vintage, and a lot of the pieces in the dining room are secondhand finds. His large black dining table (which seats 12!) is a discontinued IKEA item he found on Facebook Marketplace, and the wooden console table is also a FBMP find.
Antiques + alley finds = the perfect bar setup.
He also hunts for discarded treasures in his neighborhood in Chicago. Alex found two shelves in an alley, painted them the same deep green as his walls, and paired them with a dresser underneath to create a bar area.
“For the same price as a MALM dresser, I got a gorgeous mid-century dresser,” he says. “The vintage pieces I’ve collected over time are not only more beautiful, but they are higher quality and really built to last.”