Dining Room

This is our current Dining Room.  The original dining room was your typical closed-off, small room in a 1959 house.  It was on the front left-hand corner of the house with a pocket door leading into the kitchen (directly behind it) and a cased opening leading into the formal living room.  As mentioned in the post about the kitchen, we closed off that pocket doorway and moved that wall 2 feet so we could enlarge our kitchen.  And we turned the former dining room into a private office, adding doors in the cased opening.

The old formal living room became the new dining room.  And we used the den (at the back of the house) as our family room/den.  We just didn't need 2 living areas upstairs AND a living area downstairs.  Having one upstairs and one downstairs is plenty.

After living with it that way for a while, we decided we're really not formal people and were not using the dining room.  So we flip-flopped the dining room and family room/den.  Now the family room/den is the room in the front of the house with the window seat addition.  And the dining room is at the back of the house and is open to the kitchen.  That's what works for us.  It is a huge room which allows plenty of room for extending the table for extra seating or even adding an extra table.  Currently, we use the extra room as an upstairs play area for our kids.  They're both under the age of two, so we have lots of stuff that requires space (activity saucer, swing, play mat, trucks, balls, books, etc.).  Depending on your personal preference and lifestyle, these two rooms could easily be flip-flopped again just by moving the two overhead lights.

Here's a little background about what we did to this room.  Originally, there would have been a solid wall between the kitchen and this room - the dining room (originally a den in 1959).  The previous owners took down that wall and put up two half walls with an opening in the middle.  When we did the kitchen remodel, we took out those walls completely and removed the header across the ceiling so that it would be one clean, continuous surface.  We added recessed lights and the sconces over the buffet.  We added the two openings on each side of the buffet to create a more open floor plan and raised those openings as high as possible.  We also raised the original doorway coming from the foyer.  Additionally, we opened up the wall where the stairway is located.  That's where you see the white railing. The dining room light is our homage to an original light located in the kitchen.  It has a pulley and can be raised and lowered to the desired height.