formal dining room

[hsembrick]

I voted other!

We turned our "formal" dining area into my scrapbooking room. There is also enough room for a seperate table and area for my kids to have a seperate craft space.

We have friends who turned theirs into a home office/ reading room with a sleeper sofa in it. It turned out really cute.

 

[mrodgers]

We wish we had a dining room. Heck, we wish we had an eat-in kitchen. The house is so small, the kitchen was only 7 feet wide and how it is laid out, there wasn't room for a table other than a tiny one (previous owners were a retired couple.)

So, we knocked the wall out between the kitchen and living room and the table we eat at is in the middle, half in the kitchen and half in the living room.

 

[bellarella]

OP, have you thought about repurposing several rooms?

If your dining room is open to the entrance of the house, could you make it some other room -- like a formal living room or family room or office space? Then if you have any of those spaces, change them up to be a playroom/craft room?

Or you could multi-purpose the room. Get a hutch or something that could store some of the items you are wanting to use the room for. Have the space be function when it is just family, and but have a place for everything to allow it become a more formal space when you need it.

 

[PHXscuba]

Our formal dining room has a full-sized pool table in it. Our neighbors around the corner with the same floor plan are using it the same way. Our house does have a pretty large bay-window breakfast nook that we can comfortably seat our family of 6 full-time and up to 10 for family gatherings. More than that, we're breaking out a second table anyway, so we set up a 6-foot folding table for 6 in the wide entryway (makes a great kids' table mostly out of sight/earshot of the grownups!) Or the kids eat out on the patio when it's nice.

If DH hadn't begged for the pool table, our dining room would probably have more of a library feel with a mid-sized table for homework/crafts, bookcases, and maybe a computer. It may yet ...

PHXscuba

 

[DaniB]

The room the previous owners used as a formal dining room, we don't. I can't understand how they did honestly... it would be a little awkward and they had carpeting in here. Maybe it was just staging to sell the house?

We took down the chandelier light and put up fluoroscent lightening. Removed the carpet and put down laminate flooring. Now it's our computer room & my scrapbooking room.

I have 2 long tables along one side, a short table to the side, and 4 huge tall cupboards behind me. Two filled with scrapbooking supplies, 1 for other stuff, and 1 for my husband. Love it!

 

[charming23]

I voted other as we have no "formal" dining room. Our house has a large eat in kitchen but no extra dining space.

 

[disykat]

I voted office. We call it the "den."

We have a dining nook off the family room/kitchen where we eat. If we stretch the table toward the family room, we can easily fit 10. We also have a breakfast bar. The formal dining space is an "L" off the living room. We have bookcases, a large computer table (two computers), and a file cabinet - all matching so they look good enough to be off our more "formal" space.

Our whole house is less than 1800 square feet, so we really didn't need 3 eating areas!

 

[bluezy]

Our formal dining room has a full-sized pool table in it. Our neighbors around the corner with the same floor plan are using it the same way. Our house does have a pretty large bay-window breakfast nook that we can comfortably seat our family of 6 full-time and up to 10 for family gatherings. More than that, we're breaking out a second table anyway, so we set up a 6-foot folding table for 6 in the wide entryway (makes a great kids' table mostly out of sight/earshot of the grownups!) Or the kids eat out on the patio when it's nice.

If DH hadn't begged for the pool table, our dining room would probably have more of a library feel with a mid-sized table for homework/crafts, bookcases, and maybe a computer. It may yet ...

PHXscuba

LOL! Friends of ours have a ping-pong table in theirs! They're a family of 3 and have entirely too much space in the house they live in and don't have enough "stuff" to fill the space. They decided the ping-pong table could be promoted from the basement to the "formal dining" room.

 

[emdav]

Our formal dining room has a full-sized pool table in it. Our neighbors around the corner with the same floor plan are using it the same way. Our house does have a pretty large bay-window breakfast nook that we can comfortably seat our family of 6 full-time and up to 10 for family gatherings. More than that, we're breaking out a second table anyway, so we set up a 6-foot folding table for 6 in the wide entryway (makes a great kids' table mostly out of sight/earshot of the grownups!) Or the kids eat out on the patio when it's nice.

If DH hadn't begged for the pool table, our dining room would probably have more of a library feel with a mid-sized table for homework/crafts, bookcases, and maybe a computer. It may yet ...

PHXscuba

I've noticed that the pool table in the dining room is a popular thing to do in Arizona. When we were house hunting, several people had this set up. The previous owners of our house had a pool table in the dining room too.

We have a formal dining set so that is how we use ours. There is also a small desk with a computer as well. My husband thinks it's horrible to have a desk in view of the front door. My feeling is that is someone doesn't like me because of my desk, they already didn't like me.