Formal Dining room?

[Guest]

My paternal grandmother had something of a walk through room at the very front of the house off the entryway. It was the formal dining room and the living room had an informal dining room. We only used it on holidays but it was where the 'adult table' lived, whereas us children ended up in the informal dining room at our own table until were about thirty ;)

 

:0)  Thirty.  About right.  LOL

[redsquirrel]

I'd think the "walk through room" is your formal living room, your dining room is your dining room, and the other one in the front of the house is an office/study or a family room. 

 

That layout would also make sense in 1860.  These days, not so much, lol.  Not only have I no need for a formal sitting room, but I don't even have the furniture, lol.  At least when the house was updated they divided the upstairs into bedrooms and even gave us a teensy tiny half bath. I was told that it was just one open space, as was common back then. They put their money into building the downstairs and left the upstairs a plain open space. It's also why the full bath is downstairs right off the kitchen. Pipes were expensive so when running water was put in, they put everything in one place.

 

I also think it would feel weird to walk in someone's front door and land right smack in their living room or dining room.  I guess I'm just a die hard foyer person.  I need a transition space. 

 

[Seasider]

I love having a formal dining room and wish my schedule permitted using it more often for formal dining (or not really formal dining, but for having groups over for dinner).

 

I use it for a project table quite often, but mostly I like that it's a room that's easy to keep clean. When the rest of the house is falling apart, I can usually rely on that one being neat.

[AnnE-girl]

I love having a formal dining room and wish my schedule permitted using it more often for formal dining (or not really formal dining, but for having groups over for dinner).

 

I use it for a project table quite often, but mostly I like that it's a room that's easy to keep clean. When the rest of the house is falling apart, I can usually rely on that one being neat.

My dining room is mostly clean, aside from when DS decides to spread the entire newspaper over the table. Even that isn't too bad to straighten up. We've bought inexpensive flowers at Trader Joe's a couple of times this summer, and I love having a lovely, clean space with flowers to sit read or work on my grocery list. It's only been three months since we've moved and I'm so grateful to have a space other than our one little table in our old cramped kitchen to do anything.

[LucyStoner]

We are sitdown dinner people. My favorite rental house before we had kids had a breakfast nook in the kitchen and a formal dining room. We used the formal dining room for most dinners, eating in the kitchen mainly for breakfast and lunch.

 

When we buy our next house, a formal dining room and eat in kitchen are high on my list of wants. If I had to chose, I would sacrifice the eat in kitchen for the formal dining room.

 

I abhor the huge "great room" open floor plan. I need walls.

[DawnM]

We have a countertop we eat at with just our family, but we don't have an eat in kitchen.  There isn't room to put a table in there without it being very awkward.

 

So we do have a dining room and we do use it.

 

My oldest son loves to play elaborate board games, so it gets used for that too.

 

Sometimes the boys do homework at the dining room table.

 

It use to be the school room when the boys were younger.

 

I like having a dining room.

 

 

[Bambam]

We use our formal dining room as a library/school room. When all the kids leave home, it will still be a library, but I am not sure what else we will use it for.

[QueenCat]

I didn't use to want one but am now glad to have one. I like being able to seat everyone at the same table when we have company for something more formal than a cookout.

[Janeway]

We are sitdown dinner people. My favorite rental house before we had kids had a breakfast nook in the kitchen and a formal dining room. We used the formal dining room for most dinners, eating in the kitchen mainly for breakfast and lunch.

 

When we buy our next house, a formal dining room and eat in kitchen are high on my list of wants. If I had to chose, I would sacrifice the eat in kitchen for the formal dining room.

 

I abhor the huge "great room" open floor plan. I need walls.

 

In our house, you walk in and there you are, you can see the entire ..living areas of the downstairs. So, you see the living/family room and dining and right through to the back yard. If you step in just a few feet, you can see the entire kitchen too. The space is pretty big, but too much shows from the front door. We want an entry way now.

[J-rap]

The only real eating area we actually have is a formal dining room.  It is an older home -- over 100 years.  The kitchen has doors or appliances or counters on every wall and was really not built to hold a table, anywhere.  We have a nice screened-in-porch off the kitchen with a big table, and that becomes our informal eating area during warm weather, but of course it's completely closed off in cold weather.  

 

I love our formal dining room.  Most of the year we eat every meal there, so every meal feels special.  We always light a candle in the middle and try and make it a nice occasion.

[PrairieSong]

We had a separate dining room but when we remodeled we took out the wall between the kitchen and dining room. Now the two are one room separated by a counter space. We also have a small eating space in the kitchen which we use for overflow if needed. I love the one big room. It seems much more spacious now even though it is the same amount of square footage.

[Julie Smith]

We consider any formal dinning room a board game room.

 

Some board games we play are easier if you leave them set up between missions, because the game to play to completion might take 30+ hours.

[Upennmama]

I have an older home, too, and our kitchen is small with no eating area, so we eat 21 meals a week in the DR. I love it. 

 

[AMJ]

Given that "breakfast areas" are often too small and used too much for entries and/or traffic zones some people are still quite happy to get formal dining rooms.  A formal DR can be advantageous when entertaining -- whatever mess is in the kitchen is usually out of direct view -- but at the same time since there are usually doors and walls separating it from the kitchen some people find it less convenient for every day use.

 

Space, however, is often at a premium, and people really fall in love with large, open rooms.  The answer to that is to eliminate walls to create a more open floor plan with one or more larger spaces meant to be multi-purpose.  While these multi-purpose living spaces open to the kitchen and entries do have their advantages:

• often highly configurable and adaptable,
• allowing different utilizations just by shifting furniture about,
• easier to keep an eye on whatever is going on and even be a part of it all while getting things taken care of,
• longer distances for the eye to travel,
• less cramped feeling even when the overall residence is small

they also have some distinct disadvantages:

• noises travel further in the home and pool together,
• acoustics at times amplify noise levels,
• less wall space against which to place certain furniture or hang art,
• greater distance to outlets on what wall space there is causing cords to be strung across floors,
• harder to control climate or reduce the amount of a/c or heating necessary when some of the space is less frequently used
• mess in one usage area (like the kitchen) can't be hidden from view from another
• aromas and odors can move freely throughout the space (good -- that lovely dinner you are preparing!  bad -- the smoke from the pan that caught fire or the acetate your spouse uses at the craft table).

In addition what wall space is there is often filled with doors since the utility spaces that keep the rest of the space livable have no where else to go.  Homes with public spaces that are very open frequently need vestibules or hallways added that lead to the private spaces (bedrooms and full baths) to keep the open space noises from getting funneled and channeled directly at bedroom doors and generally give the private spaces a bit more privacy.

 

Different people will prefer different types of homes, and one individual may find his or her preference changing dramatically over the years as he/she goes through different stages of life and family, or as he/she moves to different locales.  My DH really likes open kitchens because he feels that whoever is usually in the kitchen (ahem, me) is still "part of what's going on".  I, on the other hand, really wish I had a more enclosed kitchen and eating area that wasn't a main traffic zone, simply to reduce the noise and distractions when I'm trying to cook.  More wall space in the kitchen would also lead to more cabinets and counter space, which is woefully short in our house.

 

It's the same with formal DRs, too, or any other "additional" room.  Some people really do use them for dining, especially if any "breakfast area" space just isn't big enough.  Others find them to be a room best put to other uses or desegregated to merge with another space and create a larger room.  Right now builders prefer building and selling houses with lots of open space because when prospective buyers walk into the big room and feel all that space they feel like they are getting a lot for their money.  It's only once you live with such a space for a while that you figure out how well it works for you.

[FaithManor]

The house we built when we lived in Oregon had both an eat-in kitchen/breakfast nook, and a formal dining room. DD was two years old, and our only child at the time so I loved the breakfast nook because it was handy to the stove and kitchen countertops, kept her on the linoleum in her high chair for easy clean up. But I adored my formal dining room when we had guests because we had more room to spread out.

 

In our present house, we had to work with the layout of an existing hundred + year old church building. So the kitchen is where the 1950's church kitchen was so that dh only had to update plumbing, not start from scratch, and then the "fellowship hall" is the main bathroom, and a huge family room with an eating area. It is literally, really, really big, so not having a dedicated formal dining room is not a big deal except that my family also tends to have projects going all the time, and since the dining table is here, bingo, they have their stuff spread on it all.the.time. I have a work table in the corner for them. Doesn't matter. Another handy, flat surface of significant size is just too appealing to them to resist. They are Borg or something. My eldest tells me it is inefficient to have such a lovely flat surface in use only three times per day!  :banghead:

 

So if I had this to do all over again and a different lay out of the space, there would be a dining room, and it would have french doors with locks, and the key would be on my person 24/7, and when I want to serve dinner in there I would not have to move someone's robotics project, or rocket project, or chemistry project, or......in order to serve it or get reluctant absent minded professors to do so.

[foxbridgeacademy]

For me a formal dining room means "big office" or "guest room/office".

[AMJ]

We use our formal dining room as a library/school room. When all the kids leave home, it will still be a library, but I am not sure what else we will use it for.

 

 

Our first house only had a dining area, partially open to the kitchen and open on one end to the living room -- quite nicely executed, actually.  Our current house (12 years and counting now) has a breakfast area off the kitchen (high traffic area and rather small, so only a small table and chairs sits there) and a formal DR open to a front "sitting" room.  The sitting/DR combo has been used in the past for large family dinners since the archway between the two is big enough for our extra-wide table to be extended to its full 10-foot length.  The majority of the time the sitting room is our main homeschool room (DR table collapsed to 8 feet in length, desks for the kids along the one solid wall, easel whiteboard standing in the entry for best visibility from the table) with the DR being the music room/library/office supplies stash.  Last year we even managed to squeeze in a card table for art, though this year everything gets reconfigured to fit in a microscope station instead.  Sometimes I really feel the lack of solid wall space.

 

Up through last Thanksgiving we would still break down our homeschool stuff to set the table (plus card tables squeezed in wherever they would fit) to host Thanksgiving dinner.  The kitchen table, coffee table, side tables, and skinny folding tables would all be set up around the perimeter of the breakfast area, creating in all about a 26 foot long buffet line (broken up to allow access to doorways, of course).  Such dinners are unlikely to happen again at our house since extended family has moved away -- we will be more likely to travel to them instead of them traveling to us since now the larger contingent is at their end (they moved up by other family that used to always come down to see us all down here).

 

If it weren't for the "formal dining room and front parlor" in our home we would have had a lot more difficulty fitting in everything that we do and have done.  Our ground floor is basically one large, open area, though the stairway with half-bath underneath does form some wall space.  The easy configurability of the rooms has been advantageous (we still cram a greater variety of uses into the rooms than anyone would think possible), but the travel of noise has been an issue at times.  

 

I like to play with floor plans (they serve as puzzles), and I have mocked up a floor plan I quite like for an airplane bungalow that would be nice to build sometime in the future, if it's ever possible.  I've put a lot of thought into different stages of life and their different needs, and my combination of some open spaces, some semi-open, and some quite private use features I've come to appreciate from various homes I have lived in over the decades.  The kitchen is semi-open with a doorway and pass-through to the DR (and a doorway to the back entry and pantry closet), the DR is open on one side to the main LR and has a door in one exterior wall leading out to the back porch, the LR is largely open to the front entry/staircase/inglenook area though there are a pair of bookcases topped with columns (Arts & Crafts style) to help set the transition between these spaces and deflect wind gusts coming in when the front door is opened.  More private spaces are tucked further back, past a constriction that will help reduce and direct noise flow away from the bedrooms.

[AMJ]

The house we built when we lived in Oregon had both an eat-in kitchen/breakfast nook, and a formal dining room. DD was two years old, and our only child at the time so I loved the breakfast nook because it was handy to the stove and kitchen countertops, kept her on the linoleum in her high chair for easy clean up. But I adored my formal dining room when we had guests because we had more room to spread out.

 

In our present house, we had to work with the layout of an existing hundred + year old church building. So the kitchen is where the 1950's church kitchen was so that dh only had to update plumbing, not start from scratch, and then the "fellowship hall" is the main bathroom, and a huge family room with an eating area. It is literally, really, really big, so not having a dedicated formal dining room is not a big deal except that my family also tends to have projects going all the time, and since the dining table is here, bingo, they have their stuff spread on it all.the.time. I have a work table in the corner for them. Doesn't matter. Another handy, flat surface of significant size is just too appealing to them to resist. They are Borg or something. My eldest tells me it is inefficient to have such a lovely flat surface in use only three times per day!  :banghead:

 

So if I had this to do all over again and a different lay out of the space, there would be a dining room, and it would have french doors with locks, and the key would be on my person 24/7, and when I want to serve dinner in there I would not have to move someone's robotics project, or rocket project, or chemistry project, or......in order to serve it or get reluctant absent minded professors to do so.

 

 

This describes not only me, but my DH and our kids, too.  There are NO empty flat spaces in our house.  I've tried to keep the kitchen table cleared at times, but this usually only lasts a day or two at most.  Even the extra tables we bought to extend our Thanksgiving buffet line this past year have been squeezed into odd places in the house and pressed into permanent service.  I'm going to be scrambling to try to empty one to move to the homeschool area to become a microscope station.

 

So where do we eat?  DH and I tend to eat on the sofa or at our desks in the FR.  The kids eat at the kitchen table, because I usually manage to clear half of that off for them and I won't let them eat on the sofa.  We do go to DH's folks house for dinner at least twice a week so the kids know full well how to sit at a table with others and even how to set a table with silverware before dinner gets served.

 

We just don't do fancy.  Fancy never worked for us, especially in the frequent extended family gatherings where there were more people than table places to sit at.  When DH and I got married we got a DR table and chairs large enough to seat 10 because it would sit DH and me, each of his brothers plus their spouses, MIL & FIL, and have two seats left over for others -- I thought it would be great at family gatherings and holiday dinners.  Yeah, we outgrew that table in less than a year!

[EMS83]

School room.  Assuming the kitchen nook fits my big old trestle table.  But either way, there would only be one eating area and one table used for every meal.  I think a bar top with stools in/near the kitchen would be nice, though.

 

Right now we have neither.  We have a 15'x27' "great room" that is our living, dining, and school room all in one.  :(

 

 

[Ellie]

We are sitdown dinner people. My favorite rental house before we had kids had a breakfast nook in the kitchen and a formal dining room. We used the formal dining room for most dinners, eating in the kitchen mainly for breakfast and lunch.

 

When we buy our next house, a formal dining room and eat in kitchen are high on my list of wants. If I had to chose, I would sacrifice the eat in kitchen for the formal dining room.

 

I abhor the huge "great room" open floor plan. I need walls.

 

You are my best friend. :001_wub:

 

I need walls, too. The sound...oh, the sound!!! This is the first house where we've had a living room *and* a family room *and* a dining room *and* a breakfast nook-thingie (where I can still seat six people). I like being able to putz around in the kitchen and still watch TV or talk to people, but the noise from the kitchen is almost too much sometimes. Occasionally when we have guests for an Official Dinner, we don't even come into the family room (or the kitchen); we eat in the dining room, and then we move into the living room like grown-up people. On those occasions, the light might never even be turned on in the family room.

 

I wish the builder had put the fireplace in the living room, where people sit and talk, instead of in the family room, where people might talk, but often they're going to watch TV and not the fireplace, but that's a whole other topic, lol. A fireplace was *not* on my Want List. :-)

 

 

[ktgrok]

 

 

I wish the builder had put the fireplace in the living room, where people sit and talk, instead of in the family room, where people might talk, but often they're going to watch TV and not the fireplace, but that's a whole other topic, lol. A fireplace was *not* on my Want List. :-)

 

Yes! This! Ours is very attractive I think, but in the family room, so to see it you have to come into the room with the TV and all the toys. Currently various art projects are hung haphazardly from the mantle. Sigh. 

 

As for a dining room, my living room has a dining area that is designated as separate only by a change in flooring..tile in the dining area, laminate in the living area. You walk right into the dining/living area. At least the kitchen is separate. 

 

And I no longer have a kitchen table because I utilize that space for the little kids' desks. I read over and over that kids need a chair and desk at their own level in order to form good handwriting habits, and I had no where else to put the things. 

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[Guest]

Lots of people find they don't ue them, so they are falling out of favour. I think the main thing I, you can really only eat in one place at a time.

 

Personally I prefer a separate dining room but no eat in kitchen. I would prefer to use kitchen space maybe for a desk and computer, recycling area, maybe even an area for a baby to play. Or just a space for more serious kitchen work like canning. I also use my dining room for homeschooling, and I prefer for eating with guests than in a kitchen or nook.

We Have a formal dining room and eat the majority of meals in it. We have an eat-in area in the kitchen, but the table only fits well there with four chairs. (It can be expanded to six with a leaf, but then it's too big for everyday navigating. We only extend it for parties.) I do prefer the idea of having a big dining room (seat 10-12) and no eat-in area in the kitchen, save for maybe a bar counter with a few stools.

[Seasider]

Another proud member of the I Need Walls Club!

 

Knowing that we are working through renovations on our current home, many people come through and say, "Hey, you could knock out this walk right here and really open things up!"

 

No no no. I bought this house because the wall is there. That wall, and that other wall, the the one over there, too.

 

I also need a foyer. Actually, it's my husband that demands the foyer, but I agree with him. We've never bought a house without one, he won't go past the front door if there's not some sort of designated entryway (this does not include our young married rental homes, just ones we signed a bank loan for). I don't know how and why he became that way, and he doesn't have many quirks, but that's one.

[ktgrok]

Yes, when we were redoing my kitchen my parents kept saying I should knock out the walls. I was like NO! I like walls! Plus, how do you gate the toddler in with you if there are no walls?

[Garga]

I sort of have a formal dining room.  But my house is very, very small.  So, there's no room in the kitchen to eat in.  Actually, the dining room is an addition.  The original house had a tiny little kitchen and a living room and that was all.  The first people to own the house in 1949 had 4 kids.  I honestly don't know where they ate.  I guess there was a tiny table in the tiny kitchen, pushed against the wall most of the time and pulled out to eat?  I mean, I have a tiny little table from Ikea in there and when I pull it out, if you are seated around it, your seat back is bumping against the wall or against the counters.  No room to walk around it. 

 

So, at some point someone added on a dining room to the house. 

 

​We have a table in there and we've had guests, but usually we all eat on TV trays in front of the tv watching a show together.  That's what we do in the Garga household.  :) 

 

If my kitchen was big enough, we'd use this dining room for something else.  I don't see the need for a formal dining room but that's because I hate entertaining.  We haven't had anyone visit in about 2 years.  Well, wait.  Some out of town friends stopped by for an afternoon about 9 months ago and they sat at this table, but that's about it. 

 

I've honestly thought of converting it into another bedroom, but we'd have to put up a wall and door and it seems like a lot of effort. (We are not handymen in the Garga household.)

[merry gardens]

Yes, we have a formal dining room and we use it often for a variety of things. It's become more of a multi-purpose room that can be easily turned back into a formal dining room.

 

It was our first homeschool classroom. It was my bedroom when I was on bedrest with one pregnancy and couldn't easily climb stairs. It was a guestroom when a relative came for an extended stay. It's served as an office, a project center for big projects involving lots of paperwork, a tutoring facility, a walk-in closet, a library, and more. But whatever else it's been, it's been a formal dining room first and foremost.