How to Transform a Formal Dining Room Into a Space You’ll Actually Use
If you have a formal dining room in your home, chances are you don’t use it often. While the dining room was once the focal point of a home and is still high on some people’s wish lists when they’re looking for a home ( 70% of home buyers want a dining room , according to the National Association of Home Builders), studies have shown that few actually uses his dining room for its intended purpose.
If your home has a formal dining room that is currently a liminal space of dust and shadows, you may want to reclaim that space. Square footage is getting more and more expensive these days and there’s less and less supply , so reclaiming a room you don’t use or only use a few times a year is obviously an attractive idea. If you don’t have a small fortune to spare to turn that dining room into something you’ll actually use, don’t worry—there are ways to make this room functional without breaking the bank.
Best Alternative Uses for a Formal Dining Room
Your first step, of course, is to figure out what you should use the space for if you don’t intend to host dinner parties there. The room next to the kitchen probably isn’t the best choice for an extra bedroom (and you may have to close off the dining room and add a door, which can be expensive), but there are a few ways to make that dining room feel more spacious. useful if you add a few pieces of furniture and clever staging:
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Home office. We’re increasingly working from home, so turning your dining room into an office is a healthy and easy choice. Add a desk, a comfortable chair or small sofa, a floor lamp, and you’re all set.
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Library. Do you have bookshelves throughout your home? Combine them into what used to be a dining room, bring in some reading chairs, and you’ll suddenly want to create your own home library.
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Game room. If you have a pool table, ping pong table or slot machines hidden in the basement, why not bring them into the light? If your dining room has a large dining table, something like a pool table could easily fit behind it and would be a great place to hang out while dinner is in the oven.
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Room for creativity or hobbies. If you have a hobby—whether it’s scrapbooking, music, or sewing—bring a sturdy work table and a place to store your supplies, and use that space to feed your soul, not your belly.
Of course, you can use the space however you want. Once you know how you want to use the space, it’s time to transform it. The good news is that you don’t have to spend much (or any) money to achieve this.
How to Remodel a Formal Dining Room
The first thing you need to do is get rid of the low-lying chandelier or pendant light that most dining rooms have. This light is typically mounted about three feet above table height, which is ideal for a seated group, but becomes an odd obstacle if the room is being used for any other purpose. Replace the light with a cool flush-mounted ceiling light, or perhaps a less obtrusive (and more useful) chandelier light.
Keep in mind that if the dining room light fixture is not in the center of the room, you’ll probably want to make that spot the focal point of your new room—place an office desk, library chairs, or gaming table underneath it. light so that the space does not look unbalanced.
Next, you need to define the space, especially if the dining room opens into other rooms, such as the kitchen or living room. It doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated:
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If you’re replacing the dining table with something equally large, such as a pool table or craft table, that may be enough to define the space.
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In a home office, a large area rug that fills the space can act as an implied boundary that makes the space feel special.
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Bookcases or other storage can be used to define the physical boundaries of a space while serving as a visual cue to the room’s new purpose.
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Repurpose built-in modules. If your dining room has a built-in china cabinet, hutch, or other storage, removing it will be expensive and probably unnecessary. Think about what you could store in them instead—files, books, or office or craft supplies—or how you could use them differently, such as turning them into a bar .
If you like the idea of getting a whole new room, but might want to use the dining room from time to time, consider a few flexible space ideas:
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A folding folding table can sit against the wall most of the time and be used for storage, but in a pinch it can be used for a small dinner party.
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If you need a game room most of the time and a dining room occasionally, a game and dining table combination like this one can give you the flexibility you want.
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If your new room will have a large table—for crafts, games, or whatever—some folding dining room chairs will keep the space clear when not in use, but make it easy to return the space back to its original purpose. whenever you need.
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Transforming furniture on casters (like this desk, sidebar, and dining table in one) will allow you to change the purpose of a space on the fly by simply flipping things over. Combined with a few folding chairs in stock, you can have your dining room back at any time.
At the end of the day, all that matters is that you use your personal space the way you want. If your dining room hosts a lot of dinner parties, that’s great, but if not, you can change things up.