Friday's 5: Dining Room Remodel

Part two of an occasional series about what I'm enjoying in my "new" house one year after we started our big renovation project.

Last year, in the midst of renovating most of our downstairs, we hosted Christmas. It wasn't fancy, given that most of our furniture was still outside in a pod in our driveway. But we made it work.

The dining room was only partially finished then, so I'm extra excited about hosting Christmas dinner in there this year. It's not a very big room and mostly square, but here's what I like best about the room...

1. Open space: Because the space was small, we opened it to the kitchen (by removing the top half of the wall) and living room (by widening the doorway and adding the pass-through openings between the columns) to give the illusion of more space. It's a less formal space that way, but it also means that we use it every day now.

2. Woodwork: The wainscoting adds interest to the room and dresses it up a little. It also breaks up the expanse of wall along the side of the house, so we could use a darker wall color above without having it overwhelm the room.

3. Display cabinets: Again, because it's a small room, we didn't want to put a lot of furniture in the space. But we desperately needed storage. So our talented carpenter built cabinets into either side of the doorway with the living room. Now we have beautiful storage/display space inside the cabinets, as well as serving and display space on top.

4. Hidden cabinet: Not as showy, but no less lovely than the display cabinetry is this little wonder tucked into some dead space on the back of the kitchen wall. Our fabulous contractor built the cabinet door right into the wainscoting, so you almost don't even see it -- but it's hiding a huge storage space that otherwise would have been wasted. (Unrelated to the dining room, that pumpkin sitting there is the one I used to make this soup.)

5. Chandelier: The piece de resistance in this room is definitely the chandelier. Originally a gift from my husband's grandparents to his parents when they were married, my mother-in-law passed it on to us a few years ago. We waited until the renovation was complete before installing the fixture. It's tough to capture with my amateur photography (which may or may not have been done with my iPhone), but the design is funky and sparkly and beautiful. Combining the fancy lighting with the rough table adds just a little touch of quirky to the room that makes me very happy.

Now all I have to do is order our Fresh Market holiday dinner, and we're ready to go!

Check out the rest of this series...
- Part 1: Powder Room
- Part 3: Family Room