02-08-2010
When Is a Dining Room Not a Dining Room?
We’re doing it again.
In preparation for having a small home dojo in conjunction with our new rented room at a local church, we’ll be moving our rooms around.
Have you ever done this?
It’s something I indulge in every now and then; it helps cure that stagnant feeling I get when I’ve been living in one place for too long.
Lots of people do things like turn a spare bedroom or guest room into an office, right? I just like to take it a step further. Our living room, for example, could probably lay claim to an identity crisis. When we first bought the house it was the living room. Somewhere along the way, it became “the train room” (we had a large table with Dylan’s model train layout on it, and we needed somewhere to put it).
Then it became the dining room. And I actually got the idea to turn it into the dining room one day about an hour before my friend and her family were coming over for dinner. So Ward and I moved the dining room into the train room (which had been the living room) and the train room into the dining room.
Eventually, the train layout got dismantled, we moved the living room back into the living room (only we decided to call it the sitting room, as by then we already had a living room in the addition we built at the back of the house) and the dining room was transformed back into a dining room.
(And the dining room was actually our old kitchen, but then we (and IKEA) turned our old den into the kitchen, which is why the old kitchen became the dining room.)
Are you confused yet?
Everyone’s so used to it, no one even blinks an eye when I get one of my room-flipping ideas. Although my husband always grins and points at me whenever we watch Sleepless in Seattle, at the part where Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner are talking about one of their clients wanting to pick up the house and spin it around.
This time around, though, I’ve actually got a legitimate reason for all this room flipping; it’s rather nice to have a reason. I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason before.
In order to have a home dojo, we do, you see, have to actually vacate a room in which to put the dojo. So we decided to use the living room; it’s in the addition, is beautifully bright and sunny, and has French doors opening up to the back deck.
So here’s what we’ve decided to do (it gets slightly crazy, I must admit): we’re moving our living room furniture into the sitting room, because it’s much nicer than the ratty old leather sofa that’s in the sitting room right now. So the sitting room will be our living room again.
We’re moving the old ratty leather sofa to the dining room (which used to be the kitchen and which, in fact, still has all the kitchen cabinets still up, plus a freezer and our old fridge). So now the dining room will be our sitting room.
Meanwhile, we’re going to do some desk and table swapping between the dining room and the office, because, as it turns out, we just might be using as a desk a table which would be perfect for the new dining room.
And where would that be, you might ask (if you’ve followed along this far and aren’t dizzy from all of this)? At the bottom of the stairs, right outside the kitchen and beside the living room (the old sitting room) we have a lot of wasted space – 8 ft X 9 ft, to be exact. Perfect size for a nice, cozy dining room, right?
So we’re going to switch desks and tables around, and create a new dining room where there was nothing before.
I’m really liking this. And as I pointed out to Ward, whenever we have people over, no-one ever goes into the living room anyway except the kids; everyone likes to hang out in the sitting room which is divided from the kitchen by a half wall of cabinets. Yes, the same sitting room with the ratty old leather sofa.
Only now, it will have our nice new living room furniture in it. Because, you see, it won’t be our sitting room anymore. It will be our living room. Which was what it was when we first moved in. See how nicely it all works out?









