If you're lucky enough to have a dining room in your small home, you're most likely using it for more than meals. Like many of yours, ours can often be spotted posing as our craft room, home office, and reading nook; but I still like it to look and function as a special place for dining. Here are a few inspirations for striking the balance.
• Home Office. Sideboards are hard-working pieces, capable of holding more than just dishes. This one hides a complete office while overhead shelves hide papers in attractive boxes that fit as nicely into the dining room as any office.
• Lounge spot. Row houses with centered fireplaces are tricky spaces to plan. Placing the dining table in front of the (assuming non-working) fireplace gives dining a priority while still allowing room for a lounge-able reading spot.
• An everything room. The farmhouse, expedit-esque shelving unit houses extra dishes as well as magazines and other non-dining related extras.
• Crafting Space. We've featured the talented Leah of More Ways To Waste Time's awesome sewing desk/home office/dining room before, but it's one of the rooms that I keep finding myself coming back to for inspiration because it maximizes the function of the dining room without making it feel cluttered or haphazard.
• Library dining rooms.
What extra roles does your dining room play, and how do you keep it ordered?
Images: 1: Homes and Gardens, 2: Elle Decor via Splendid Willow, 3: vt wonen, 4: Leah of More Ways To Waste Time via Apartment Therapy: SF, 5: Oprah via Apartment Therapy: DC
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Comments (5)
yes ...my husband uses it as a desk ...drives me crazy ...although he gave the extra room to me as my sole office/closet so I really can't complain. Some of these are very creative.
xoxox
www.lovemaegan.com
We live in a huge apartment yet still use our formal dining room as the hub of our house. We have all of our book in there, a dining room table that we eat at, as well as work on, and a living room area next to the table with chairs, a coffee table, and couch where we spend hours on our laptop. In our house apt. we spend 80% of our time in the dining room.
(Oh that pink room hurts my head...)
My (new) dining room is my craft studio (polymer clay jewelry.) I have Expedits serving as a buffet with door and drawer inserts for supply and tool storage, and Billy's with glass doors on top for display and wooden doors on the bottom for more storage. It's a little cramped, to be honest, but then we rarely use the room for dining. The few times we have had guests, it worked out ok.
currently our dining room table is too large for our small breakfast nook (worked fantastic in our last apartment with a dedicated formal dining room).
once i downsize, i plan on designing a diy breakfast nook with a wrap around bench with homemade pillows and padding. there will be cantilevered seats with storage available underneath for all of our board games/china.
also planning to place some long shelves on the wall next to our fridge so i can make it my craft/scrapbooking area as well.
I have a tiny dining room which I also use as a computer area:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/miloodle/5084298181/