Our new house won’t be much bigger than our current house. Most of the additional square footage will come from our “bonus room” above the garage which is going to be our workout room (style book on THAT later). But, due to various reasons (like the fact that our dining furniture came from IKEA almost 12 years ago – guess how awesome it looks now!), we will need some new furniture.
One of the biggest reasons we decided to sell was for more entertaining space. We love to have people over. It’s never formal (we will, again, have no separate dining room from a kitchen eating area), but it’s always fun. We all enjoy having a big group over to share a big pot of soup or a bunch of homemade pizzas.
This kind of informal entertaining brings to mind a long table with benches on either side. I love this look and it seems just about right for the kids. I’ve found some great benches with tables, but I wonder if we would miss the backs on the chairs.
So another option we’ve been looking at is to buy a fairly simple dining table – the one above is from Crate and Barrel and then put a mish-mash of chairs around it. The kids currently sit on folding chairs I spray-painted funky colors, so I thought bringing in a couple of Marais A Side chairs from Industry West in similarly funky colors could be fun and finish it off with some pretty simple chairs on the cheap from IKEA. Or maybe we’ll do both. Jury is out.
We also need to replace our 12-year-old IKEA side bar. It’s been through two moves and is pretty crumbly by this point. The simple industrial look of this piece from PB Teen caught our eye and we found it on a great deal a few weeks back and bought it. It’s getting sent to the old house and will move to storage with the rest of our surplus furniture. I like that unlike our sidebar, it will hide away the STUFF.
Lastly, we will want to accessorize a bit. The dining area is open on one side and has lots of windows and the cabinet is fairly tall, so we probably won’t have much on the walls. Just maybe some typographic art. But we will need window coverings. I’m thinking fairly standard panel curtains in a nice mellow graphical print. We may also elect to swap out the provided light fixture for something a bit more fun … though certainly nothing we have to do immediately.
I love the Scrabble. We took out most of the wall between our living room and dining room and made the kitchen no longer eat-in. Our dining room is still pretty formal, though. Our wall decor is a tapestry that was my great aunt’s. But for us, it works. No kids and all that. I’m also an antiques girl, so I have 3 sideboards that I’ve bought at auctions: 1 in the dining room and 2 in the living room. It’s all about the storage.
LOVE everything you picked out. Where did you find the top photo with the benches?