[NaturalMamma]

...plus a family room, how do you use it?

I *hate* the fact that we have a formal living and dining area separated from our kitchen and family room (all on the 1st floor). I would much prefer to have a great room, but we couldn't be choosy when we bought a house here.

Right now we have a wall unit/cabinet in our dining area w/some glassware. There is no formal dining table--it would be too snug w/the wall unit anyhow. Our living room has all of DD's toys, little kitchen stove/sink plus an old dresser w/shelves for her craft supplies.

Our family room has our TV, a sofa and an arm chair. It's small. Next to that and between the kitchen and family room is a table and 4 chairs. Our family room through the kitchen is hardwood flooring which is why we planted the table in between them. I don't know how we could ever entertain people in this house.

So, how do you utilize and organize these rooms?

cindi

 

[ColoradoMama]

We have a formal dining room that currently houses my computer. That's it! It also has two chairs in it right now, but they are just there temporarily until we have the basement ready for them.

 

[~Nikki~]

Haha, this is actually one of the reasons we're moving. We have, on our main floor:

-A large kitchen with a "breakfast nook" that is the same size as the large kitchen, and has a fireplace. We use this area for our table, and still have room for a sofa and TV.
-A dining room that is just as big as the kitchen. We put our spare table in here and it's totally dwarfed by the size of the room.
-A formal living room with another fireplace, and our "good" living room furniture. I can count on one hand the amount of times we've used this room since moving here.

IT's just too much space. Way too much wasted space. I'd turn it into a sewing area, but it's too exposed to the rest of the house.

 

[mightymoo]

We don't have a formal living room - our house is a rectangle, divided into four rooms downstairs - living room, office (has a door on it), kitchen and dining room. The dining room opens to the kitchen, so we use that as a playroom and all the kids toys go in there.

 

[HipGal]

I have a never-used living room. We have toys/tv/computer all in the family room, which is nice and big & has a door to the backyard so it is great to hang out / play in. No one ever hangs out in the living room, even when we have parties. We used to have soft arm chairs & a coffee table in there, thinking we would go there to read, but we still never do.

I was thinking of turning it into a studio/craft area, but it is the room you first walk into when you open the front door. I don't think I could keep it neat enough if it was an artsy space. Not sure what to do with it!

 

[tinybutterfly]

We use both our living room and our family room every day. Our living room is like the hub of the house oddly enough. It's the main area where everyone passes through eventually.

I don't go down into the family room much, because my husband is usually down there watching some t.v show I don't even like and he's busy doing work he brought home. I pass through there on the way to the laundry room. The boys like to spend time in both the living room and family room.

We have a formal dining room complete with furniture and we use it. Mostly for holidays. We host. But also for special occassions. This week ds#1 is having his "official" graduation party with his friends, and we will probably use the dining room table as a place to set out all the food buffet style. Not sure yet.

At holiday times, we use the kitchen table as the buffet center and everyone sits in the the dining room. It gets crowded. We don't have enough seating in the kitchen, and even in the dining room we have to bring in extra kitchen chairs and squeeze everyone in!

We also have a wetbar down in the family room and a large round table. If I didn't have MCS ( multiple chemical sensitivities) we would probably host more gatherings and this house is set up fairly well for entertaining.

We ended up hosting holidays as our parents are getting too old to do it now, and our kids are older and too busy to take away from home for several days at a time during T-giving, Christmas and Easter.

Often during times when the dining room is dormant, there is a large jigsaw puzzle on it that we work on as we can.

Right now I don't mind the extra space too much, but as we get older, we will probably move to a smaller house.

For now, this size suits us fine and we use it. When we first moved here it seemed so big, but as the kids grew older ( and bigger) and we ended up taking over holidays, my perception of how much "wasted" space we had changed.

I still like cozy homes, but for right now we use the space we have.

 

[tinybutterfly]

P.S. The nearest family members live 2 hours away. Everyone else lives 5 to 9 hours away, so we also have a guest room and a couch in the den for people to sleep on when they come to stay.

I think it changes things if you are fortunate enough to all live in the same area and don't have to deal with overnight guests, or if you go to their homes, travelling and spending several days away from home.

Oh, and if you all live in the same area you could trade off hosting!

 

[jennay]

We have a living room, dining room, and family room all on the 1st floor and we do use them all.

The family room is open to the kitchen and has our only TV in it as well as some of the kids toys. The kids can play in the family room while I am cooking and I can keep an eye on them.

We have a small table in the kitchen that we usually eat at.

The living room and dining room are huge and connected to each other. We host many family gatherings of 20+ people so we have a huge table in there (the size can be adjusted). There's also a matching buffet that holds the nice dishes and the few crystal pieces we own (we do use most of them). The buffet also stores my candles, vases, placemates, special serving dishes, platters, etc.

The living room used to look really nice until our cats clawed the furniture. I am looking into getting a nice slipcover for the sofa and loveseat. Currently the clawed areas are covered by a throw. Also in the living room is my great-grandmother's piano. I teach music lessons in this room. DS also goes into this room to read alot - there is a lot of natural light. And the Christmas tree goes here in December.

I have considered turing the kitchen and family room into one big country kitchen with the dining room table and buffet in the FR and then having a big family room where the living/dining room combo currently is. But it is nice sometimes having a more formal area of the house that doesn't get as cluttered and stays looking nicer for company. And there is a fireplace in the current family room which we like to use in the winter. Not sure if we would use it if the room was a dining room. But then maybe I could just get one of those fireplace candlelabras and save the money we usually spend on wood. Hmmmm. And if I change the rooms around I can't keep an eye on the kids when I'm in the kitchen.

 

[Golden]

We have a kitchen that is half the first floor, with our dining room table.
One quarter of the first floor is technically the dining room, but it does not have a table - it is the kids playroom. The other 1/4 of the first floor is the living room. no family room. Although we do have a finished basement that is a pit with trainsets, forts of blankets, huge boxes as fire trucks and whatnots...all the big stuff that is being used for more than an hour.

By the way, we are so not the entertaining type. I think in the five years we have been here, we have one or two people over for dinner. So the dining room really would never be used and we really needed a place for toys. Maybe when the kids are older, we can move toys to the basement and reclaim the dining room, but really I don't miss it. :0

 

[MommyErin]

It's funny that this came up. We too have a living room, family room, and formal dining room. We do most of our living in the family room. It has a sliding glass door with backyard access, a wood buring fireplace, and a half bath. I like the formal living room because it's the one "grown up" room in the house -- always cleaned up, nice leather couch, piano -- and gives me a spot to have an adult conversation should an adult actually stop by!

However, I decided I *hated* the formal dining room. The kitchen is big enough to eat in but barely. We never used the dining room. Ergo, we just removed the wall (or at least most of it) between the dining room and kitchen, creating a great room of sorts. We left the two ends of the wall in place, basically tripling the width of the doorway. We took the small table out of the kitchen and now eat all of our meals in at the big table. It's soooo nice. I'm thrilled with the results. And when we have family over, people can sit at the table and drink coffee (as my family is want to do) and those doing food prep can still visit with them.

I think that we need to conform our homes (as much as truly feasible) into places that function how we live or want to live. Right now, it seems that people live according to the layout of their house. Honestly, if it weren't for the half bath in the family room, I'd take out the wall between the kitchen and family room and have one huge living space. However, I have this thing about not wanting to have a bathroom in the same room as my kitchen. For some reason, this kind of grosses me out.

 

[Ygle]

Our family room and kitchen are all open and then our living room and formal dining are open to each other, but the family room and formal dining are pretty small (no way could we actually fit a formal dining table and chairs in there!). Our dining table is actually in the family room and then we have shelves with games and art supplies in the same room so we can all hang out and eat or play games.... it's still a tight fit getting around anyone when we're all seated at the table. Our formal dining room we just have a toy shelf and computer so the kids all gather around the computer or play on the floor with toys and it's open to the living room if we want more space or have more people over.

 

[hibana]

Our house is also a square, with kitchen and living room on one side of the hall, and dining & tv/exercise rooms on the other side. We use the dining room mostly except in the dead of winter when that side of the house is closed off to conserve heat- then it only gets used for entertaining.

eta: I hate non-functional/inconvenient dining rooms!

 

[queenbean]

I would actually love to have a separate family room and living room. I would convert one into a playroom so my daughter's toys wouldn't be all over the place when company comes over.