Dining room: would you want one? do you care about one?

[WinkyWinkola]

We're moving soon. The house has a big kitchen - enough room for 6 seater dining table - and a dining room.

I can see the dining room being used once a month and at Christmas.

It's a luxury that I don't really need. Or, am I missing something?

Should I actively use it as a dining room and enjoy that or, I was thinking perhaps as the children's play room. Contain the rising tide of tat and mess. With a telly in it. It's not very big - 13'2" by 10'4".

Maybe I should just make it into the grown ups sitting room/study etc instead and let the kids have the big, usual sitting room.

Thoughts on dining rooms, please.

[Mandy21]

Agree that generally speaking, they don't get used very much. We have a table in the kitchen that we use day to day.

Pre children dining room was somewhere to dump the clean washing and paperwork.

Post children, we use it as a play room - sofa, lots of storage, small TV and Wii etc. Generally a tip but I can shut the door on it.

Hopefully we're extending soon and dining room will be incorporated into the kitchen & extension to make a big open plan eating / cooking / living area. We will still have a separate lounge and hopefully, with the children approaching their teenage years by then, we might have less plastic-tastic tat that takes up so much space it needs its own room!

[Hercule]

I have a dining room but with big double doors through to the lounge. Most of the time the doors are open so it's like one big through lounge, we eat at table in dining room, kids work/draw/do crafts at table, use it for laptop etc. Then sometimes we close doors and have two rooms ( so I can read in peace away from bloody Disney channel-I have my own little armchair in the corner next to the window) or if we are having a family or 'grown up' meal.

I think if it was always separate we'd not use it nearly so much.

[mrsflowerpot]

The trouble with a separate dining room ime is that if you don't use it regularly to eat in, it just becomes a receptacle for all the crap in the house. So you'll end up with a table covered in laptops, paperwork etc and anything you don't quite know what to do with will be put in there 'for now' (which in this house means 'for ever').

We had one in our last two houses, but in both houses we ate in the kitchen 99 times out of 100 and just cleared the dining room out when PIL came to stay . In this house, we use the extra room as a playroom/second sitting room and it's fab - as the kids are growing, it's less full of toys but we have a tv in there for them and the games console etc which keeps the game playing arguments out of 'our' room. I have a lovely fantasy about it being a snug-type room once they are properly grown up, too.

[Jan49]

It depends on what other rooms you've got. I only consider buying houses that have 2 receptions, not 1 through room, and we always eat meals in the dining room. We used to have a house with 3 receptions, so one was a dining room, one was a living room with the settees and TV, and the third was my ds's playroom. Then we moved to a house with 2 receptions so they were a living room and dining room. It was useful having a playroom when ds was little as you could keep a close eye on him whilst doing things in the kitchen.

I'm now renting a house with 2 receptions but one of them has been knocked through to the kitchen so it's a kind of kitchen diner. I love it. In effect it's a dining room but closely linked to the kitchen. I can lay the table whilst things are cooking on the hob. The kitchen cupboards are actually partly in the dining area and it wouldn't suit someone who had lots of guests for dinner or didn't want them to see the kitchen.

[NoComet]

Ours is computer room, art and craft studio, office, sewing room, junk store, library and occasional spare bedroom.

We even eat in there *properly, about ten times a year.

• I often eat lunch at the computer and DH and I eat in there if the DDs are watching total rubbish.

[primallass]

No, not keen on dining rooms. I cba lugging all the stuff through. I would love a playroom though.

[georgedawes]

Had to laugh at the dining room for other porpoises! :-)

[Periwinkle007]

we have a dining room which we use every day for every meal. BUT we don't have room for a table in the kitchen so quite different.

If we could get a table in the kitchen then I would probably go with a study or playroom for the other room.

I think you need to work out which use would suit your family best.

[PatriciaHolm]

We have one,but we have a playroom and study as well and can eat in the kitchen too so space isn't really at a premium. In your case I would probably turn it into a playroom/kids tv room.

[EeyoreIsh]

We have a dining area to our living room and we use it lots. We can hide the kitchen chaos from guests, I use it as an office when I work from home, etc.

but, I don't think I'd use it if was a room on its own. It's part of the living room (with furniture used to divide the space) so it feels light and airy.

We do have another random room, which we call the 'middle room'. we've not worked out what to do with it yet! It's just a huge junk room at the moment

[Ginformation]

Oh, and I would give the kids the smaller room and the bigger room as the living room. That way you can all still fit in there, whereas the adults will rarely user the play room.

[Ginformation]

I prefer a kitchen/diner and then a play room or library/study. It makes no sense to me to have 2 eating areas, seems a waste of space. Unless you get a gate fold table so the dining room can be used for other porpoises.

[emsyj]

I used to be absolutely obsessive about having a separate dining room, until we moved into a house that had one and we used it about 5 times in 2 years.

The house we live in now used to have a kitchen/diner (very distinct separate areas and quite large) but we have extended it and created instead a second living room, dining area and galley style kitchen which I prefer. We hardly ever use the dining area.

Unless there is already space for you to have a lounge, study AND playroom, if there is space in the kitchen for a good sized dining room table and chairs then I would ditch the formal dining room and use that room for whatever you will get most pleasure from. For me, it would be a playroom.

[MadeOfStarDust]

I would love a dining room -

we have a through lounge right now - there is no escape from the kids - if they have friends round, we are all in the same room unless they go upstairs, if they need to do homework, the other can't spend time on the playstation/tv/stereo as it is too distracting etc. Having that separate room would be fab as the kids grow older.

[VBisme]

A dining room is important to me (because then I can leave the kitchen in a mess and relax with my guests over wine instead of fretting about the washing up).

[soundevenfruity]

I would have big sliding doors leading from the kitchen so that the rooms can be made into one or kept as two.