Today I want to share some of the updates we made to our formal dining room before we found a family-friendly solution for this space. When I shared the before photos of our playroom, I mentioned that we’d made some changes to the formal dining room as well. This photo shows how the playroom and dining area open to each other.
Here’s another view of the dining room. You can see the previous owners had their table and china cabinet centered under the chandelier. Through that doorway is the breakfast nook and kitchen (where we eat all of our meals), and the stairs lead up to the bedrooms and down to the den.
For our first year in this house, we set up this space as a dining area. It didn’t look that different from the previous owners’ room, but our furniture made the playroom and dining space feel completely cramped and dark. This is the same furniture from our dining room in Arkansas, and it’s a great example of furniture that works in one house not working in another!
We decided to try something new right around the time baby girl #2 arrived. We desperately needed more room for adults to sit while kids played in the playroom, and we realized we’d used our dining furniture about five times in the year we’d been in the house. So we removed the dining furniture and brought our couch (the Hamilton Leather Sofa in Sienna from west elm) up from the den. All of the sudden, the front of the house felt so comfortable and open. A sitting room was born!
We needed an area rug to keep the furniture from sliding around and to soften the wood floors, and after looking at hundreds of rugs online, I fell in love with this gorgeous blue one. For a rug this size and style, I honestly couldn’t believe how amazing of a deal it was!
If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw this photo I shared of a little corner of this room. That little wood and white end table is one of my very favorite furniture pieces. You’d never guess 10-year-old Meredith once painted it baby blue with white clouds and a yellow sun to match her childhood bedroom! Ours is vintage, but here’s a similar, inexpensive one on Amazon, if you like the look. The envelope-style pillow covers were a DIY project using fabric from Hobby Lobby. This is the gold cross fabric I used, and here are two fabrics similar to the navy blue.
Even though we loved having this couch in the sitting room, once our baby started sleeping through the night, we got some semblance of our old lives back. Turns out that couch is pretty awesome for Netflix watching after the kids go to bed, so we decided to move it back down to the den (where we hang out in the evenings). Luckily, we had several furniture pieces we loved at our old house that hadn’t found homes here yet, and moving them into the new sitting room gave them a chance to shine!
I’ll be sharing the after pictures of this sitting area soon, so check back for those later this week! In the meantime, if you’re in the market for a super durable and comfortable leather sofa, we do love ours #hearteyesforever. And that rug. It’s a great deal and really, really, ridiculously good looking (name that movie!).
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