Home improvements: Bad news and good news in the dining room

Bad news: projectile feline scarf-n-barf.

Good news: all over the worn-out sisal rug I'd been gunning to get rid of for a while.

You might remember our dining room rug. It was a big day when I turned it upside down.

Way before.

Before.

The truth is, though, no matter how I flipped it, the thing was looking pretty tired -- worn, stained, cat-scratched, and completely unraveling in one corner.

When the aforementioned bad news happened I started to clean it up, and then I had this moment where I just felt DONE. Over it. I rolled up the rug and threw it outside.

That rug had been through 11 years, two houses, a wedding, four cats, and a baby. It had done its job, you know?

And secretly I'm grateful to our gluttonous cat. I'd been wanting to try removing the rug from the dining room for a while.

Thank you, Daisy, for solving my home decorating dilemmas.

Daisy shows us what she thinks of all this mockery.

My husband was skeptical. He thought (1) the lines around the previous position of the rug where the sun has faded the finish on our wood floors would look funny and (2) a dining room without a rug would look unfinished, as if it belonged in a house of college dudes.

It's true that there are sun-fade lines on the floor, but I don't think they are particularly noticeable.

His second objection I guess is a matter of taste. I'm definitely in agreement that we want to aim for a grownup-looking space. But I don't think a dining room necessarily needs a rug to look finished. When I look at my Pinterest board of dining spaces I see plenty of bare-floored examples, like so:

Original source.

And like so:

Original source.

Especially in an eensy space like ours, I think a rug can just create visual clutter. So. Here's where we are today. (The round table arrived here. Funny enough, in that post I was worried about how stressful it was going to be to find a rug my husband and I could agree on. Like how I sidestepped that issue?)

After.

Anyway, I like it. My husband has not mutinied. Nice and simple looking, and it's definitely easier to keep clean.

Hey, and how about that flower arrangement on the table? Just a few stems gathered from our front yard earlier today.

The funny, spiky things with balls on the ends are anemone flowers that have lost their petals. (From these anemones here.) I think they're kind of funky and modern, and I really like the way they look with the subtly shaded, late-season hydrangeas.

I realize it's a bit cheeky to get rid of a worn-out old rug and label it a "home improvement." And I'm certainly not claiming that just getting rid of things will solve all interior decorating quandaries. But I do think that when we're thinking about replacing or upgrading an item, it's worth including "actually, do we need that at all?" as a step on the flow chart.

As a matter of fact, I recently did something similar in the kitchen. We had a mat in front of the sink that had always been kind of ugly, never stayed in place, had become horribly cruddy and stained, and couldn't be washed. I did ponder getting a nice rug of some sort to replace it, but in the end I just chucked it, and I haven't missed having something there at all. (Hm. Who knew I had such a vendetta against floor coverings?)

In the dining room, I've got my sights set next on reupholstering those chairs. I mean, this is pretty bad, right?

And this is not a case where I can just get rid of something and not replace it. But it should be -- knock on wood -- a pretty easy project: just stretch the new fabric over the seat and staple to the bottom. I'm thinking of a metallic gold linen -- it would echo the texture of some other linen we've got going on elsewhere in the common areas of the house, and I think the gold might fancify everyday meals a little bit without being fussy.

I need my dining room upholstery to be wipe-able, though. So I'm thinking about laminating the fabric. (Yes, I realize this is probably not the most environmentally friendly project ever, but I'm willing to compromise a bit for something durable.) Has anyone tried something like this?