How often do you use your formal dining room - Thanksgiving, Christmas, or maybe once a month?
Instead of having both a breakfast room and a dining room, why not have one eating area and use the other room for a different purpose?
Consider having all of your meals in your dining room and converting the breakfast room into a home office, arts and crafts room, homework room, reading room, pet room, mud room, exercise room, or whatever other room you would love to have in your home.
You can even remodel your small kitchen and expand it into your breakfast room or dining room to get a design magazine worthy kitchen of your dreams.
The photo above shows a recent kitchen remodel that I designed for some wonderful clients.
I was asked to design the new kitchen in the original footprint of the existing space.
After speaking with the family, I suggested that they should consider expanding the kitchen into the dining room to create a more functional kitchen instead of rebuilding the exact same kitchen with prettier finishes.
The home luckily had a generous breakfast room, so we decided to expand the kitchen into the dining room space, doubling the size of the old kitchen.
Here is the "before" photo taken during construction before the wall separating the kitchen and dining room was removed.
To accommodate even more people, we added comfortable upholstered seating at the new island.
One of the most dramatic improvements made was removing the furr downs above the upper cabinets, allowing the cabinets to go all the way to the ceiling.
The new taller shaker cabinets made the ceiling height seem higher and allowed for more storage.
The traditional 3" x 6" marble subway tile backsplash gives an elegant and rich feeling to the space.
The colorful accessories add some fun, but can easily be changed as tastes change through the years.
Multiple light sources allow the lighting to be set at different levels depending on the task and time of day.
The tiny pantry was replaced with a wall of cabinets that holds not only food in one section and cleaning supplies, extra paper goods, a broom, a mop, and hidden television components in the other section.
