If you’ve been following me on Instagram you’ve seen a bit of a progression with our informal dining room. Our house has an open floor plan. As in literally wide open. The kitchen, dining area and living room are a giant rectangle. Off of our informal dining room is a sunroom that is serving as a first floor playroom for now.
Even though this house is about twice the size of our last house our list of things we need to purchase is suprisingly small. All we needed (and I use the term need very, very loosely since we could clearly live without all of this stuff) was furniture for the nursery, a loveseat for the living room and a new dining room table. Everything else was packed into our old house. This house doesn’t have more rooms, just one additional bedroom and one additional bathroom. The spaces in this house are bigger and the whole house has a much better flow, making it more livable. Our old house had so much wasted space. It drove me nuts.
My main focus since moving here has been on the nursery. But since we spend most of the time in “the great room” I’ve been itching to get the furniture arrangement down. When I found out we were hosting Easter it was all the impetus I needed to repurpose our old buffet and get started on our dining room table. Our current dining room table is a 42″ round number from Tarjay. It has served us well for the last 8 years.
When I was working with the architect to design our home I had visions of a long table that would sit underneath a beautiful lantern and seat our entire family for holiday meals and gatherings. This is some of what was in my head…
Our table arrived yesterday and I’m pretty thrilled with it. I designed it myself and then worked with a local salvage yard to have it built. The table weighs a jillion pounds. Gorgeous old wood. Here’s a crummy iPhone picture of what things look like now.
I am saving up for this lantern, although my experiences with the company for other lights in our house have left me without a warm and fuzzy, so I may find something more awesome and less wallet breaking. For now a “looks better than I thought it would” $35 chandy from Lowe’s is serving its purpose.
On one side of the informal dining room is the sunroom which serves as the kids’ playroom for now. On the other side is a wall that is adjacent to our staircase. I’ve been scratching my head for what to do with this wall. The table isn’t centered on it, it’s actually centered on the opening of the sunroom, which kind of throws off my sense of balance.
Initially I thought I’d do a gallery wall. My love for gallery walls runs deep, as is evidenced by our old living room and hallway. They are a beautiful headache those things. And since I don’t have a lot of time for headaches, I thought I’d just redo our living room gallery exactly.
And because clearly I have too much free time on my hands today, I mocked it up in photoshop.
My next thought was to reuse the frames and start from scratch. This was sort of my vision for the new wall. Although tiny hands will surely teach me a lesson if I run photos up and down like that…
I think I am going to recreate our stairwell gallery or redo it entirely in the upstairs landing. And since our guest bedroom will have a sort of gallery wall that hides the wall mounted TV. That’s really probably all of the gallery wallin’ I should do, right there. So perhaps a dining room gallery is superfluous, no? But it does look purty. And it would be done in like 30 minutes flat. So that’s always nice.
Another thought was a plate wall. Which is sort of a gallery wall, I guess. But it’s plates people, so clearly not the same thing. (Right?) And while I would love to spend my weekends antiquing in search of beautiful transferware, I see this as being a never ending project. Plus, I’m not sure if a plate of walls in a dining room doesn’t seem obvious.
I also thought about oversized canvases. I saw this photo and thought it could be awesome, but I wonder if it’s not better suited for our living room. And perhaps instead of three separate canvases, one larger canvas might be nicer in there. Or two stacked.
But now we’re clearly talking about the living room and not the dining room. Although since it’s just one big room there is maybe a need to have them be interconnected. I am so not ready to think about the living room right now though.
Then there’s always straight up art, like a pair of abstract canvases. Or an oversized print. These abstract pieces are from Horchow, but I’d bet my bottom dollar you could find something nicer, cheaper and more original on Etsy.
And since I’ve already mentioned the living room, I think I would want to do art art like those examples on the large wall in that room instead of in the dining room. Ten bucks says I cave and redo our old gallery wall before Sunday.
Before I attend to the four loads of laundry that clearly won’t fold themselves, I’ll leave you with these pretties. Also known as my inspiration for the living room I am “not ready to think about yet”. Ha.
