He Says: Making the dining room a multipurpose space

Buying an older house that has been renovated in the past results in inheriting some weird additions. For us, its the dining room. What was once the back veranda of the house has been closed in, and turned into a dining room off the kitchen. That oddly suggests that the kitchen used to be external to the house, which I doubt. I think what is now our office used to be the kitchen but Amos disagrees. This house must have had a really weird layout originally. Anyway…

Dining Room – Before

The dining room is long and relatively thin. Our table, which can easily sit six, doesn’t get close to taking up all the space. And considering how little we use the room we decided to give it a secondary purpose, as our library using the back wall as a small reading nook. The original room was full of hooks, used for running cables, hanging pictures and holding that huge rope light you can see in the picture. The windows were old and cracked, and not really all that functional. But it was a good-sized room, probably too much for just a dining room unless you wanted to put in a giant 10+ seater table.

Combined dining / library

Dining Room – After

So just like the rest of the house we removed the copious amount of hooks from the walls, painted the walls and replaced the skirting boards, ripped up the laminate floor, grabbed the big single-seater arm chairs I nabbed from my work when they moved offices, and with the addition of the new window and sliding door, (post coming soon about that) the room has a whole new inviting appeal. That appeal was helped by some smart shopping by Amos, grabbing some cushions, a throw rug and this awesome lamp from Kmart for next to nothing (about $60 all up). Add in some flowers from the garden and who wouldn’t want to sit there?

Next thing on the list is to get some artwork on that back wall. Eventually we would like a third book-case and replace those chairs with something smaller, but for now, it’s cozy, inviting, and more importantly, not a wasted space. When people come around now we spend more time in that room than the living room, and that’s a good thing.

Wookie

A musician, and IT professional, master of the flat pack assembly and now a home renovator. A man of many skills, you could call him a renaissance man. But not in like the whole Renaissance fair type deal. Those things are just weird.