If you had a house with two reception rooms and a kitchen large enough to have a table in...

[headfairy]

would you have one reception room as a living room and one as a playroom when you come to sell the place?

We currently have our front room as a grown up living room. No toys, nice sofas we try and keep clean and fingerprint free. Our second reception room leads on to the kitchen and was originally the dining room, however we have a sofa, a shelving unit on one wall with tv built in to it, a desk with computer and lots of toys (tidied away in boxes I hasten to add). The kitchen is long and at one end we have a table which if truth be told is a bit big for the space (dh didn't measure very well), it's a 6 seat oak table, but we can all fit around it, so it does show that you can easily get a decent sized table in the kitchen.

When we come to sell, do we move the large table in to the playroom/dining room and get rid of the desk/toys/books etc, or do we leave things as is?

Rhubarb just out of interest why are you against your DH's idea of knocking kitchen/diner together with second reception room? I've been considering doing this. (funnily enough DH is against).

thanks for the comments everyone... it is decorated very plainly. White walls, solid oak floors, plain roman blind at the window. The shelving units we have up are similar to these Ikea ones but a bit wider. The sofa is a brown chenille three seater. So apart from the boxed up toys, it's not a massive leap to picture it as a dining room.

My only concern about rearranging back to being a dining room is where would we put the table? Basically you have to walk through the room to get to the kitchen, the door from the hall is directly opposite the door to the kitchen. If you put the table in the middle of the room you have to walk round it and I think that upsets the flow, but tables shoved up against walls look odd IMO.

To me it wouldn't matter how you arrange furniture in your house at the time of viewing. I would go on size of rooms & how they connected & general repair & the potential I could see in them for my own needs & desires. But whether you filled rooms with life size anatomically correct dolls of Dolly Parton or too many kitchen tables would be irrelevant.

This whole "suggesting a lifestyle" thing completely baffles me (although if you were a bizarre enough person, I might be put off having to enter a formal contract with you). You & your "lifestyle" won't be there after I move in!

Our downstairs layout sounds similar to the OP's.

We have a six-seater table in the kitchen and 8-seater in the dining room.

I would say that if you only have one table, put it in the second reception room, set out as a dining room table. This way, you will have a dining room as well as a massive kitchen.

We eat in the kitchen, btw, and use our dining room for computing, and a general dumping ground. Not very conducive to selling.

When we moved 2 years ago, the end of the living room (now used as a playroom) had a dining table in it. This was how most of the houses we visited were, even if they had a table in the kitchen too. I guess it was so they appealed to a larger audience - more people want a dining room/office than a playroom I suppose.

Minipie I'm usually all in favour of knocking walls out! But in our case the existing kitchen diner is already huge having previously been two rooms with the wall between already taken out. If we took out the wall between it and the reception room, it would be pointlessly vast and I think it would be more useful to us as a family room. Also, the wall between the rooms has a door with beautiful original stained glass panels either side, and I wouldn't want to lose those.

Ah ok, those don't apply to us

and thanks!