Dining Delight

My dining room furniture was built by my Great Uncle Abe in 1917, in my Grandmothers living room. It stayed there until the late 60’s, when my family moved away from the old neighborhood. It came to me in the 70’s, and it has moved with us ever since. This story is not about the furniture, but is caused by the furniture and our living situation.


When moving here, and everywhere else we’ve moved, we have to take the dining room furniture into consideration. It is large, and we need the space to have it. In our current home, the table, chairs and the sideboard live in the dining room while the china cupboard lives in the living room. We have two other china cupboards as well, one is in the hall and another one is also in the living room. The combination of antiques and “family furniture” is sometimes a difficult fit.

There is an advantage to buying IKEA, and that is that you never have to worry about passing it on to anyone. So, distributed among the antiques there is a large helping of eclectic Swedish modern.

We usually eat meals in the kitchen, and our table/counter works well for the four of us. The dining room is reserved for more formal events, as was customary in days of old, and we eat holiday dinners in there as well as we usually use it for dinner parties. We are really good for up to six people in the dining room. The minute we go over six, we need to put in the leaves. This is no problem as such, but when the leaves are in and we have more people, there is not really enough room for the dining room table in the dining room!


The answer to the problem came about through trial and error. The first time we tried it many years ago, we put in the leaves and opened the table and it straddled two rooms. While this was not a problem by itself, there are walls separating the living room and dining room that left some people behind the wall on either side.

The solution, as much as it pains me to admit it, is to change the rooms whenever we have a larger group for dinner. Now, when we have a very large group, we do a buffet. We set food out and people go all over and find a place to sit; in the kitchen, living room and the family room, and all is fine. However, for a more formal setting we move the table and chairs into the living room, and open the table. We move a large stuffed chair, a side table, a coffee table and the piano bench into the dining room. The living room becomes a living room/dining room for the night and the dining room looks sort of like a reading area. (you will have to forgive my hat,coat and gloves which I arranged on the chair on the right and forgot!)

It works!