How important is a dining room to you?

Rebekah1021

Since meeting the builder and getting ideas about how we want our house to be, we are leaning on not having a formal dining room and instead making it a den.

We are just not formal people. I do realize that by having company over we will just eat at our table which will be in the eat in area and there will be more than enough space. I will start hosting holidays in the future as well and it wouldn't even be big enough for half the family.

So, am I crazy to not have a dining room? 

Mominator

For me, it's a dealbreaker. We eat at the dining room table every night.

Mickschick

If you know you are going to host holidays then a dining room would be importantbto me. We rarely eat in ours...mostly at the island in the kitchen. However; we host holidays andvwe never have been able to without the dining room.

knmommy

we have no dining room. 

MayorMcCheese000

I think the only way I would be okay with it would be with an open floor plan where the kitchen was opened up to the main living space.

Rebekah1021

MayorMcCheese000:

I think the only way I would be okay with it would be with an open floor plan where the kitchen was opened up to the main living space.

This is exactly what we are planning on doing. 

UGAbride

I'd really have to think about it...we do have one in this house, but it is very, very rarely used.  And I really wish that our whole house could be "lived-in" and the dining room is in a prime location where it would be awesome to use that space for the kids to play.  I even floated the idea of selling our dining room furniture and turning it into a playspace (for now), but DH wouldn't go for it.  However, if the house was built in such a way that it just didn't include a dining room, he would have been fine with it.  I think a lot would have to do with if you really will be regularly hosting large holiday affairs, then you might want to have one, but if not, you could always rearrange and set up temporary tables for those rare occasions.

ali-1411

Our living room, kitchen, breakfast nook and dining room are all one big room.  The kitchen is somewhat separated by an island. 

We've made the dining room a play area and our table is in the breakfast nook.  We do Thanksgiving every year with nearly 30 people, there's no way we'd all fit around a dining room table anyway.  We're all spread out, eating wherever.  

Besides my parents, I don't know anyone with a formal dining room.  They all use the space as a playroom, den or something.

Heidisean

We are actually breaking ground tomorrow on our new home!!!! We technically have a dining room that we are turning into the kids play room. We have an open floor plan and the kitchen goes into the breakfast area that is open to the daily living room with a fire place. The dining room was suppose to have chair rail going around and also a big chandelier over the table. I asked to move the chair rail to what they have listed as the formal living room. We are turning that one into another gathering room sort of like a den. Soo excited!!!! GL

Carol*Brady2

I prefer to have one (always have had one).  I want the option of hosting fancy dinners, holiday, etc even if we don't often do it.  I also am not into open floorplans--my kitchen gets messy & stays that way at times.  I don't like it viewable from the door, living room, etc.  Right now I have the living room & playroom on one side of the house a large foyer in the middle & then the kitchen (w/ eat in area), dining room & laundry on the other side.  It's pretty much my ideal setup (food being totally separate from living).  I also live in a city in the area where most houses are 100+ yrs old...I don't know anyone without a formal dining room )

FriskyPanda

I thought it would be important in our next house, but really I can't imagine a room sitting unused as much as it would.  We have a small eating area off the kitchen now, and as long as the next house has something similar I won't mind not having a dining room.  Actually, if it does we'll probably convert it to something else. 

Heidisean

I should say that we do a lot of entertaining but our daily table opens up to fit 8 and if we needed to we could put up a fold up table for kids. I would rather a play room instead of a dining room so the toys are not all over the house. In years to come we are going to leave it the girls play room that they could hook up the Wii or watch TV with their friends, etc. Sort of like a rec room.

Rebekah1021

Heidisean:

I should say that we do a lot of entertaining but our daily table opens up to fit 8 and if we needed to we could put up a fold up table for kids. I would rather a play room instead of a dining room so the toys are not all over the house. In years to come we are going to leave it the girls play room that they could hook up the Wii or watch TV with their friends, etc. Sort of like a rec room.

We have our dining room in this house as a playroom. The plan for the next house is to set the basement as a rec/movie room.

We do lots of entertaining here and it hasn't been a problem with the lack of dining room. We have our dining room table in the eat in kitchen area. 

mattswife91805

our old house had a formal dining room, we never ate it in it became DD's playroom. The house we have now has a huge kitchen with and eat-in area. When we have family over, we have plenty of space. But we don't host holidays or have big entertainment parties.

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EastCoastBride

If you have a big enough eat in kitchen, I probably wouldn't have a formal dining room either.  Dh and I like to entertain, and we even host Thanksgiving every year.  But we aren't "formal" w/ any of this.  As long as I had a space big enough to host a good number of people, I'd be fine. 

superslug

When we built our house we made the formal dining into a study, the butler's pantry into a full blown pantry and made sure the kitchen had an area big enough for a large dining table (ours is 8ft, but we could fit a 10ft in there). I love the way it's set up. When we have get togethers everyone congregates in the kitchen anyway. When we lived in our old house we didn't even have a dining room set and the formal dining sat empty the entire time we lived there.

KellyGreen

Our house was built in 1927 and has only a formal dining room?  Most houses in my area are like this.  If I were building, I would not have a need for a formal dining space, but I would need room to be able to put up folding tables to seat at least 16 for holidays.  They could flow into a great room, though.

CleoKitty

Our dining room is essential, but only because we do not have an eat-in kitchen. Too small for a table in there!

If we did have a large eat-in kitchen I wouldn't see the need for a dining room. It would just be redundant at that point, IMO, and a waste of space/resources. 

GinandTonic

CleoKitty:

Our dining room is essential, but only because we do not have an eat-in kitchen. Too small for a table in there!

If we did have a large eat-in kitchen I wouldn't see the need for a dining room. It would just be redundant at that point, IMO, and a waste of space/resources. 

Exactly this.  Our house is OLD.  The former owner (an older widow) had a little table and chair in the corner of the kitchen, but it was so low on storage space in there, I decided I'd rather have a sideboard...

In fact, I think about turning our tiny sunporch into a breakfast nook with a pub table - just so we're not eating in the "formal" dining room all the time (it's certainly not set up very formally right now).

happy_momma

For me, it's important to have a space where a group of 10 or so people can sit comfortably for a meal - whether that's a large dining area in the kitchen or a separate dining room is not important to me. In our current home, the dining area of the kitchen is not tiny but not quite large enough. It's a comfortable size for a table that seats 6, but it would not be comfortable for more than that, so we do use the dining room a good bit.  We have a lot of family in town and have family meals fairly regularly - not just holidays.  If we had a dining area in the kitchen that would easily fit a larger table, I wouldn't feel a need for a dining room. Or if we didn't have family local and only needed more dining space once or twice a year for a holiday, then we'd just make do with whatever and would not feel like a dining room was essential.

shouldbworkin

We did that in our house.  We closed off the pass through to the dining room and made it into a den.  It was a 12x12 dining room, which would never be big enough for what we want.  We turned the living room into a great room and now when we entertain we use the great room, which is connected to the kitchen.  It works better for us b/c we entertain big crowds and need the room in the great room.  It's also nice to have the den when we entertain as an extra place to sit and gather away from the kitchen/kids. 

jlw2505

For me it would really depend on the lay out of the house.  In my current house, yes - I have to have a room where I can put a bigger table.  I can only really do 6 people in my kitchen and that would not be enough for most times when I have company.  If my house was set up where the kitchen was more open or open into another room and I could open the table or add other tables, than I would have no issue not having a dinning room.  If I ever get around to redoing my kitchen, one thing that I am thinking about is taking down the half wall that separates the kitchen from the dining room area and then getting rid of the dinning room table and having a kitchen table that I can just open up and using that dinning room space as part of the living room which is connected.  I don't use the dinning room table a ton but maybe once a month and sometimes more the few times a year that my parents come to visit and stay with us.