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Formal Dining Room Cross-Overs

Let's talk about specifically the dining room and look at some really cool ways that people have used dining rooms to make them want to use them more so you can think about expanding your living space into the dining area with more functional uses. Or yesterday we were talking about ways to bring the dining room into the living room just when you need it by using pieces of furniture that turned into dining tables. Maybe they're consul tables with gate legs, and so then suddenly, when you need it, you can have a dining table in there, but not all the time. So there's all sorts of things that you khun do for dining spices and really let your ideas be guided by the room in the architecture and the layout. This is my own dining room in my last time, and I have a formal table underneath there. I don't always use a cloth on it, but for parties, sometimes I do. But I think it's a pretty looks so you could easily if you had chairs that you were using in other ways that could come in to be a di...

ning chair. You could totally have just a folding table underneath a beautiful cloth and have it stored somewhere in bringing out when you need to have a formal dining space it doesn't have to be an expensive table that fills an entire room twelve months of the year teo to make a dining room work so let's look at a few dining room makeovers and on pinterest we saw a hint or two of some of these yesterday look jake aaah here's your dad's dream die nearing although it wasn't billiards I guess that what was he playing snooker but yes, he always wanted the table and I thought the obvious compromise would be to get a beautiful top dining table converted but my mother was so attached to the family dining table she wouldn't give in so he's simply bought a pool table or snoop put it up in the what wass at that time the second bedroom in the guest room one and I talked yesterday about there are many tables now and I've seen some really cool ones even for outdoor dining that the top just that slide open or remove and it looks like an eating table and it has billiards or some other kind of gaming surface underneath so it's totally a possibility uh but this one is basically just a dining room that has been permanently converted into a game space that's a really nice top colors well unusual andi, just another example of who knows if this was technically a dining room but just the idea of large spaces in a home not being dedicated to something that you're not going to use now a lot of people feel the opposite. A lot of people have pool tables that they never ever used and just like the treadmill, they just constantly put things on them and it becomes the catch also it's you know, on ly make sense if you actually you're going to play pool. I loved this idea of the library and the home office combined, so a lot of people are saying they really want a library. You were saying, you love the idea of a library, elizabeth, who works here so she really wants a library should men who works for me that was here this week and helped create a lot of this content with me is let wanting, you know, dying for these kinds of spaces in her life. So any kind of room, certainly a guest bedroom or another space that you could turn into a home office, you could just utilize all that wall space for, um, for a library, but dining rooms, as we saw yesterday, were I think we're going to see that same image again in a moment can can be great spaces to combine the dining with the library all in in a more traditional way I think the one we saw yesterday was this one right here, which we loved right? And this could be a dining room. It could be a crafting station, it could technically probably be your home office. It could be a meeting of space for sure if you were working from your home. So that's the idea of combining the library and the dining room, which I happened to love um, and even just thinking that maybe you don't need a dining room at all and you use spaces to create, you know, turn them into more living spaces, but the lot the idea of a library, even those first, some people books have become so obsolete because they're reading everything on their candle there certainly people who are still great collectors of books and want entire rooms arranged around them, this space could work for all sorts of things that could be a dining space. It could be an extension of a living space, and it could be a ofthis areas. Well, I think but all of those things in this small area depending on how much you dine and a table like this, we talked about this a little bit yesterday to you could have a larger table top placed on a table, even a folding piece, so if you had a cloth made and you had a folding top that you could sit on top of something as solid as a desk like this, it would easily hold it just to create a larger table surface, a rectangular when or even if it if you didn't want to skirt on, if you had it finished in the right way, you can put things on top of a table and just really increased the size now would add a little bit of height to it, but typically, you know, quarter and three quarter of an inch piece of wood is not going to change the chair heights so much that it's uncomfortable to die in there if you're only doing it on occasion, lots of examples of beautiful dining rooms and libraries combined. This was an architectural digest, so really formal, even the library ladders, which I love. So I think these two activities seem to work really well together, so if you want a library but it's also a room that you might not use that often and he wanna maintain your formal dining room, which is also not a dream that you would use that often by combining those two together, it just doubles the function of the spaces at least you're more inclined teo to use them on a regular bases. Many found many, many examples of this idea. Any of you in here really big readers or wanna library like some of the other I see some hands in the back from the team said I don't read so much these days I tend to read a lot of stuff online so this is again and problem my sister has a challenge because her husband is book obsessed but she converted virtue because they live on a four storey house they have a lot of staircases and she virtually converted all the staircase walls into library and it looks really good I love this one this is a designer out of new york and he has this bank hit and um in a library space and a bank it like this if it's the right height is a great way to push your table up to or put a skirted table two and then you only have to have a futures on the other side and you end up with a ah lot of people seated at a round table so um using a little corner space like this for lounging and for you could really combine all three ideas of a living space a library and then a potential conversion to a dining room all in a space like this if you're living in a really small home and I think there's one it's in the it's going to be in our living room section and here's here's a home photography studio so just taking an entire portion so you see the living room back there this was probably intended to be something like a dining room or a space like that and really they said, you know, this person decided I'm a photographer I need a home photography studio and they just made the decision that they didn't need a designing room they need I mean, a dining room they needed this space more so just creating that photography studio right there in the middle of the house that linda que de onlytest same because they're renting they no longer have a dining room anymore. So now the dining area has become a flex space and they used the kitchen table, but she also uses that as a work space. Yeah, I think she's an interior designer, that honest, I'm so she's using it for designed so again and then there's lots of people as we heard the person online saying they wanted to turn the play room into a closet. There are many, many people who have taken spaces that would have been the dining room and turned them into place basis because really that's just what they need, they have kids, they have all of those things to store and they're off kinds of options of creating fun kids spaces but if you need a kid space more than you need a dining room at certain life stages that you're in and it really makes sense to think about that because if you're all crammed into a tiny little living space and you have this big down here and you never go and it really doesn't make any sense for you at all, so may not be the your favorite idea you may not necessarily want to come into the front of the house and see a whole kid zone, but if that's where you are in that life stage it's not forever it's not permanent kids are going to grow up really fast but it's, what makes the most sense for you at the moment that was resonating with our audience toe because they're all saying they've all got rid of their dining rooms they've used that big space that was wasted, so they're now using much more functionality? Yeah, I asked there's a little part of me that hates it because being that southern traditionalist I do love the dining room but I just know from most of the people that I continue to talk to like this like in this scenario and all the cold courses are teaching with my own clients that's the one room that people not only have a hard time justifying that much square footage there, but also as we've talked about the expense it takes to buy formal dining furniture it's really want other than like the kitchen it's in bathroom with those renovations and installed appliances and fixtures as faras just furniture goes it's really one of the most expensive rooms of the house, particularly for how often ease it a designer I know in canada, uh, uses the term price per cent, so you know whether something's worth sitting on have worth the money depending on how often you sit on it and said the price per cent of your living room sofa versus the price per cent of your dining room chairs are probably far different, and we're spending, as we said, a lot of us five hundred thousand fifteen hundred dollars on a fully upholstered dining chair, each one and I mean it's, it's not hard to spend fifty thousand dollars in a dining room when you get a five or six thousand dollar table and eight thousand dollars chairs and a buffet and all the pieces in the chandelier. And so ugo, I've spent a huge portion of my budget in this wonderful, traditional, amazing formal room, and I just don't ever go in there. It's really difficult you showed earlier of thie it was like a tope colored pool table in the room there, yeah, monica has done this, she said she had a very large formal living room and a very large dining room so she turned the formal living room it into an adult pool table room which the guests love they said they can eat a wonderful meal around it and then they complain so she has a table top of it yeah and we talked yesterday about that my friend is a designer that turned up a large plexiglass dining table into a table tennis when they're not eating on it they just put a little net over top of and says this really cool plexi and metal table on a regular basis but on pretty much weekly the kids were playing table tennis on it so there's lots of clever conversions you know people are asking about chuck rejoins the photographer they're saying they're currently using their dining room as their photography studio because they like having that tabletop for the vortex I think that works well so just a little a few questions about you know what would you do in your space so what is the one room in your house that you use the least how about the to be any any room that you just never go into that often I don't know about you but area stuff is very small yeah I have a small space I'm not in a big formal home and sew for us we're using all of it you are yeah even guess you don't have guest rooms or so it's just totally geographic but in areas that I'm in and sounds like tons of the people that are out talking to us on the web many of us have those faces that we're not going into s so then if you remember back to the lifestyle questions we ask on monday even if it's aspirational for you right now because you don't have the space what parts of your lifestyle would function better if you had another space is there anything that you're needing to do is that the closet is the laundry room is it addressing space a hobby? Um what are either of you dealing with that you could use more space well for me like I said, you know we have this really funky apartment I just I want to know sort of what what they were thinking what they were designing for when they built it I think it was more of like a traditional kind of get gets house but we have ah really enormous closets and one of them we convert it to more like an office because the you know, the one clause is big enough for us both that this other one a desk fit into nicely so I think that's ah, you know it was a you know, whenever thinks of sacrificing a closet but we have a storage unit that you know for everything that we don't really need on hand and then and then more of an office so it sounds like you're already taking a lot of the ideas even though you haven't been with us this week you're you're one of the people who's already thinking creatively about your space and you're willing to adapt it for your knees and you've done that sounds like you done a good job of it so let's just look at a few more of the potential unusually uses of some spaces and then we'll get to some of those design challenges but just a few more fun fun ideas this could be a way that you could potentially use a dining table and maybe it would be a little more difficult to move a computer that's actually installed but but easy to use laptops on a dining table in this way so if this was a dining space you could think about potentially what kind of table or what material of table that you needed to use you might not feel comfortable using grandmother's heirloom table in this way but something that has a really durable surface if it's going to be sometimes say the photography studio like they were just saying or the design studio and sometimes the dining table but this is just floating in the middle of the room into an office I loved dependents there perfect lighting for over a dining space is well I think this one could easily convert teo teo either space there's a duel ofthis right there in one room mill of the room I might kill myself partner if he was across the table from me two back to back I think that they would be better sitting back to back yes but that's that's that's a really good point I'm in a lot of I mean we think about ourselves as individuals working home but a lot of couples and all the families now do work from home and they need either share space because there simply isn't enough room for two office mrs bond that's another challenge I think culture a lot of people that I know are both working and you're saying there's a lot you're in is that would allow them to actually both have their home office spaces I think I was telling somebody on the team maybe j k about someone in a break this week about maybe michael about this face but this is a designer friend of mine timothy corrigan and he's in l a and this was one of his clients it's formal living rooms and they never ever went in the formal living room but they were really big wine collectors and wine enthusiasts so they converted all of the the perimeter of the formal living room into climate controlled wine storage and now they use this space all the time with their friends because when they entertain and they enjoy wine they actually enjoy it in this space so they it became one of those formal dining room living room that was sort of a museum for them and it really turned into a place for a collection that they really really love and now it's basically a tasting room I thought this was really really interesting his aesthetic stylish yes isn't his aesthetic is really traditional until he creates these beautiful spices all over the country and all over the world he has an office in paris timothy does the designer uh but I just I loved this space and this used I'd say so again just asking yourself if we're not going to get rid of the formal dining room where the formal living room what could we do to the space that would actually make us want to go in there could've house some kind of a collection or an activity or something else that would make us really want to go into that space more often and then after seeing that we collected several other examples of great wine spaces of course uh there are a lot of people that collect wine and this is I like the way that this one is done so just the end of the room is close enclosed like a closet and it's the part of the room that's climate controlled and the rest of the space is just a little small living space or tasting areas so I think this was this was attractive so if that's a hobby that you have or if something similar, you can think about how you could just bring that into your home now this is the kind of room that I'm looking for in my home that's probably really a spot don't know if it's a homes, I mean at a at a at a spa commercial spot, but I am creating a space in my house that is, until ji astray, my hurt woman cave of my house and it's going to hold a little home office that I'm converting closets into storage in a death space I'm gonna hopefully put my budget allows I want to install a yoga wall, which is a wall that used like ropes and, um like straps, yoga straps to do yoga poses on it's, just like looks like a pegboard wall, and then I have a treadmill in there, and I also have a portable massage table in there because I don't have time I travel so much and I do get massages on a regular basis and people come into my home so making a space that holds all of those and all my healthy habits and I could do yoga in there, so it's gonna be really, really fun to create that space. And it's a really tiny little it's just the third bedroom upstairs and we don't need we have one child, so we have her room we have a guest room and then there's this other space and so that's going to become last space so here's a yoga wall right here it's exactly what they look like if anybody's interested so you're able to put these little hooks in with straps so you typically use traps and yoga and allows you to do poses and almost put yourself in traction, which is fabulous and feels wonderful on and it just is on a wall and it looks really stylish and sleek like that so many, many ways you can rethink your home. So any other ideas coming from this for any of you hears many closets that bedrooms that have been turned into closets rachel do so lost you have posts do you have a cat cat that's, right? Because mr nye both but I have one darkness you have to I know throughout the week, pets has been a big thing and you know all this why don't we never give a pet are their own space way? We've looked at some challenges and you know how you doing corporate they've been into your space is yeah, that would be fun if someone had a and here's a choose another closet uh that may be very much looks like that was just a conversion of an extra room into a closet yes, so that would be fun I'd love to hear if anybody someone gave their pit its own bathroom out online, but I wonder if anyone has given them maybe somebody has a more unusual your pet its own bed or anyone out there has got their own crocodile or hippopotamus we wanna hear from me did you create your own space? I've actually seen on pinterest the under stair cupboards people made those into little doggie rooms maybe gate that's a dog room mate okay, so let's, I think we have about ten minutes or so probably that we can look at another one of the challenges unless anybody else has any questions that you want to ask in the meantime, we're getting lots of you know, different comments about the other really echoing what you're saying here and they're finding a really interesting that they think, wow, I needed to find that solution and now they've got it so keep it coming because you just need somebody that treats expert to give you permission to get rid of the thing that it's been just bugging he would spit in your hand oh my gosh, I don't even know why we have that room for you just needed someone to say you can get rid of it you don't have a habit and even little very little solutions, like jasmine show pin this saying they put the shelves around the world, the doors of the rooms and that's where they started storing their books. And that was a very easy, quick solution, just little things. I love the idea of seizing wall space at the library or the verdict we've talked about all week now are in yesterday and today in particular, that vertical space for the wall space, and we forget to use that you walk around with these. So these challenges organizational challenge, storage challenges. And but when you look at the walls, you're thinking, I really need to purchase some art to go over there. And it never occurs to you to say, oh, actually, that would be the perfect place to put all those things that were constantly saying, we don't have room for.