Using Our Formal Dining Room (The Bright Side of Mold)

It’s been almost a year (10 months) since I started thinking about redoing our dining room. In this post, I voiced this about using our formal dining room (and dining rooms generally):

But I wonder – if I made the dining room more comfortable, more casual, less formal – whether we would use it as the default eating spot or, at least, use it more often. Then I could turn the breakfast room into something else…although I have no idea what. Maybe more kitchen storage? A more casual eating area with an island for prep and stools for gathering – more of an extension of the kitchen?

I redecorated the dining room into a more casual space:

And I love it! But then the question remained: would we actually use it?

And then we had the mold in the family room. The family room had to be emptied and looked like this, for about a month.

Guess where the furniture for the family room ended up? In the breakfast room:

This is our breakfast room, without the family room furniture piled up in it.

With the breakfast room out of commission for a month, we had no choice but to eat our meals and do homework in the dining room.

And guess what?

We loved it.

In fact, we loved using the dining room so much that, even after the mold remediation was finished and our family room was put back together, we kept on using it. When we ate our first meal back in the breakfast room, we all felt weird about it…and decided that we liked eating in the dining room better!

Now that it’s been a couple of months, we’ve moved back to eating the majority of meals in our breakfast room. But, every once in a while, we eat in the dining room and love it – and always wonder why we don’t do it more often.

So, bottom line: if you want to use your formal dining room more often: (1) make the decor more casual, so that it fits with your style; and (2) just use it! You don’t need a fancy meal to use it; just have dinner, or breakfast, or do homework there. You’ll be surprised how much you love it.

We were.

To see the whole dining room thought process and transformation, click HERE.

For a complete tour of our 1929 home, click here: