Dining Rooms?

[aimeekitty]

Went over to the model home and our own new home again today to do some measurements and obsess about paint colors and where furniture will go.

It's kinda crazy to go from our apartment and previous condo, which were pretty small to going to a house that actually has a space for a formal dining room. CRAZY. I'm not sure if I've actually registered it as being "for real" yet.

I'm trying to decide whether or not to have my mom ship out my late grandmother's dining room set. It's mahogany I think? It'd be a lot of work to ship it out (I wonder how much it costs to ship something cross country??) but... my brother isn't really interested in it, and if I'm going to take any of it, now would be the time before we get other furniture...?

Positives for having a dining room:
- would be nice to use grandma's furniture
- it would be pretty
- I guess we might have family dinners/dinner parties?
- If we put some shades in, we could put some of our framed animation art in the room (this is a big plus actually...)
- another quiet place to work or use the computer

Negatives:
- do people really use dining rooms?
- if we bring the furniture out and later decide not to have a dining room, might be hard.

Since this room is open and very visible from the living room and as you walk in from the front door, we can't have anything TOO MESSY in there.

So the options for the room are basically:
- a clean computer area for Mitch?
- a library (we have a shit ton of cool books. and they can't fit in the living room which has no walls)
- combo computer/library
- dining room (probably with some books too.)

There's *GASP* actually a separate room upstairs for my ridiculous sewing crap, so I don't need to worry about that.

the rough downstairs layout:


The dining set and secretary:




... but I'd skew it a bit like this.
My plan is to take the accent wall, and buy some chinoiserie wallpaper in a blue or light teal, or paint it myself.


This is a photo of the model-home version of our house. So you can see the accent wall here,.. they painted it a orangey-taupe. I'd be painting it light teal with branches and birds, etc... The sideboard seen above would fit perfectly where they put theirs. And then perhaps the china cabinet and/or secretary on the opposite wall?
I wonder though if we just got one of them (ie the secretary or the china cabinet) and then put more bookshelves in there so that it could be more multi-purpose. We have a lot of books, and they won't fit in the living room.