Thinking Outside the Box

A good furniture rearrange always inspires me to keep the clutter picked up and gives me a renewed sence of appreciation for what we have! I had been pondering a furniture arrangement that "thinks outside the box". As I may have mentioned before, we have a very odd shape to our house (mostly our doing). We replaced windows with doors, took up a wall space with a wood stove, cut a huge arch out of one of the main walls, and built a tv unit completely into a wall. This equals a large space and no walls or dividers. The house itself was already odd with two half rooms and no real dining space. So.....what to do!?

Well, I got to pondering about what our family specifically needs. We don't watch much t.v. or movies so do we really need a room devoted to furniture facing a t.v.? We have a livingroom that we never use because it non functional for us. We need places to sit in the areas where we spend our time. An idea that has particularly intrigued me is a future remodel with an official large diningroom. I want a huge table where we can center our family fellowship and homeschool our children. Bedrooms are for sleeping and storing clothes, the playroom is for toys and storage.

Phil had the brilliant idea of turning our living room space into a dining room and turning our dining space into our livingroom. It is very functional for us!!


This is the former dining area. Instead of a crouded bulky table blocking the kitchen and laundry room (garage), we have the children's table where we all eat our "informal" meals.

Here is a view from the old dining room. Instead of a table, we have our couch and coffee table. In the background, is our front door and a chair to hide the dog crate.

The same view from the opposite side.

The new dining area. We moved the island storage area against the wall. This is a perfect counter space for putting food during a meal and lots of storage underneath for whatever we need.

It was so much fun to take a Saturday and make our house look and feel brand new!