Tampons Were the Secret Ingredient in This Dining Room Makeover — Really!
Narrow rowhouses and railroad apartment layouts can be tricky; after all, there’s usually one room smack-dab in the middle of the apartment that doesn’t see much light. In Emily Schmalhofer’s (@bali_brand_) Philadelphia rowhouse, that’s the dining room.
Emily says it was feeling “like a dark hallway instead of a dining room,” and she was looking to add a bit of vibrancy. “That particular area of the house gets absolutely no light. I was finding myself avoiding it and letting the table be used to stack mail versus sitting down to eat,” she adds.
The dining table was a DIY project.
Although furniture is often the last step of a room makeover, Emily actually designed her dining room around the barstools. “I own a counter stool company, and am really proud of and into the designs,” Emily says. “It was important to me to find a way to make them center-stage, so my first step was picking my favorites. I decided to mix and match.”
After that, it was difficult to find a counter-height table to complement them that didn’t feel “cheap or basic-looking,” Emily says, so she turned to DIY. “I ultimately decided to DIY a butcher block on top of an oil drum I found on Facebook Marketplace,” she says. She scored the oil drum for $30, and she ordered a butcher block tabletop to go with it from a restaurant supply store; that cost $100.
The wall art is made with tampons.
Emily also got creative with her wall decor; her main goal was to add color without darkening the space. “I was looking at options of peel-and-stick wallpaper and polka-dot decals, when I stumbled upon the most amazing Reel of someone who painted their bathroom using a single tampon,” she says. “It was a really satisfying part of the project and turned the entire wall into art … I used almost no paint at all and about three tampons total!” she adds. A box of tampons? $8. And her paint cost $35.
“It was my first tampon art dining room mural — that’s for sure,” she says. And she was nervous about making perfect circles at first, but then decided to lean into imperfections in her “period piece, if you will,” she says.
“I think I learned to turn my brain off while painting and just enjoy it,” she says. Her project total came to about $200. Emily says the project makes the dining room “match the fun, colorful energy of the rest of the house,” and her DIY advice is to “make a space that really makes you feel happy.”
Inspired? Submit your own project here.