Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We host a lot of dinners for family and friends, but those are at area restaurants. We do have a nice formal dining room of our own, but I don't want to deal with the fuss and mess. We don't have the sort of numbers that would make catering worthwhile, so reservations here or there are the order of the day.
We have a semi-open floor plan, but we also have a formal dining room with three walls and one side open to a hallway between the dining room and kitchen/great room.
With all the leaves in the table we can seat 14 to 16 in the dining room. As well as due to the hallway, I can add an old 6 foot dining table I keep in the laundry room to fold clothes as a T-shape out into the hall for another 6-8 seats. Then due to the foyer area between the front door and great room adjacent to the dining room I can add card tables or banquet tables for another 8-16.
Our breakfast nook table will seat about 8 people. So without a dining room, we would be limited in the number of people we could accommodate for meals. We have 4 kids/spouses, 7 grand kids, 5 adult niece/nephews/spouses and someday kids.
In addition, we have dinner parties that frequently fill up our space.
I like having space where everyone can sit for dinner and people don't have to juggle plates of food and drink. Even if I only seat people at the breakfast nook table, I frequently use the dining room table to stage appetizers in order to keep people out of my way in the kitchen.
As others have said, the dr table often comes in handy for multiple other uses. For us, chief among them the adult kids who work from home no matter whose home it is lol. My dining room is often set up as an office for multiple laptops for my kids when they visit. Keeps them out of my office and keeps me from having to get rid of other furniture to put desks in the guest rooms.
I am going to confess something that I really hate to confess, but you are the same age as I am. Hubby is a lot older and at our ages, most people downsize and we buy a bigger house.
Cat
Ohmygosh. So glad someone else is in the same pickle I'm in. We keep telling ourselves we've got to go DOWN, not UP at our ages, which are older than yours.
Ohmygosh. So glad someone else is in the same pickle I'm in. We keep telling ourselves we've got to go DOWN, not UP at our ages, which are older than yours.
I do justify the big house with the growing family. Grandbaby #8 or #10 depending on how you look at it was just born on the 6th of this month. The extra two comes from one of my step-daughter's significant other has 2 girls from a previous marriage. We have basically already adopted them. If we were to have the ENTIRE family-Hubby has 4 kids, and each of them have a sig other. Plus the 10 kids. If you include his sister and the two of us, that comes to 21. That doesn't even include MY side of the family. At Christmas, we only have the locals-we usually don't have 5 of the 21. That is still A LOT of people. And Christmas is ALWAYS an overnighter. Last year, while most people slept on air mattresses and there were 4 to some rooms, no one had to sleep in the living room and no one really felt cramped.
But, that is ONLY at Christmas. The rest of the year, it is pretty much just the two of us-but we both REALLY love the house and we both are so glad that we bought it and would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,551 posts, read 81,085,957 times
Reputation: 57739
We use ours twice a year, Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we have family over, about 12-14. The rest of the time it may be used for crafts, but mostly sits unused.
I don't care about unused space. We're paying for it. We like having formal dining and living rooms, even if we use either room rarely. I love a mostly traditional house.
I don't care about unused space. We're paying for it. We like having formal dining and living rooms, even if we use either room rarely. I love a mostly traditional house.
Its funny, isn't it. We feel we have to justify having a dining room, even though we want one.
Maybe we should turn it around and force people to justify NOT having a formal dining room.
We have only one space for dining in our home, which is semi-open and multi-level; officially, there are four finished levels in my home. Our dining room is separate from the small kitchen and is spacious enough for a full-sized china hutch and a table that when extended will comfortably seat eight when I add in the bench I keep under the window in the kitchen. There is also a nice floor-to-ceiling see-through fireplace that it shares with the adjoining living and family rooms. I'm not sure what to think over the open floorplan hatred that permeates this forum. There is a lot of variety in home design, and having an open or semi-open floorplan does not mean that a home cannot include more formal spaces.
The house I bought 3 weeks ago today has a small dining room, probably big enough for 6-8 and I will probably only use it a few times a year. But I get to decorate it with pretty table runners, candles, etc. It's one of the first things you notice when you walk in my house. There is an eat-in kitchen where I will put a small table with 4 chairs. I like having a separate dining room because I don't have to remove projects, homework, etc. off the table every time we sit down to eat.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
