I think you've had a brillant idea! Those two dressers or cabinets would fill in those spaces on each side of the china cabinet very nicely! :)

Jan

LOL Jan after I said that I started searching the net...this might not be an easy task :( I don't see any on ebay (normally a good place to see if anything exists). I think my spaces are about 3' each and the smaller dressers I'm seeing are 42" so I guess I should measure and continue to look. Duncan Phyfe isn't rocket science to find...

I did consider two china cabinets....wouldn't that scream "needs more storage" LOL The one in there is really narrow (the sides might be 10" and the center bows out to 12). It's not easy to find skinny dressers...Grrrr this is hard!

Just a thought -- what about knocking into the walls on both side of the china cabinet -- and creating more in-wall cabinets?

OR -- how about corner cabinets?

Jan

Igloochic, I love your dining room! Is that venetian plaster on the walls? Have you considered having a custom built piece that would run the entire wall and go all the way to the ceiling. You could do some open shelves that were glass and lighted and then closed storage underneath? I know you probably don't want to part with your lovely china cabinet which looks like a 1st cousin to my DR set, which was my Grandparent's set, but you could always put it in a bedroom or LR and use it more as a curio cabinet. I do love that my set belonged to my grandparents but I also wish it had way more storage! My mom had a triple china hutch and it held so much more stuff! BTW I LOVE that recessed wall cabinet, it's very cool! I built a *dish* pantry in my new kitchen for that very reason!

Here is a picture from my old house of some built-in cabinets we did to give us some added storage for our LR/DR. We had them on each side of the doorway leading into the DR. You could always put glass doors on the upper part, we used them purely for displaying things and the lower part for dish storage.

I can really relate to having way more stuff than storage space! Both my parents loved crystal and china. When my Mother passed away unexpectedly my sisters and I all inherited her vast collection of china and plates. My daughter once joked that Nana had enough dishes to feed an entire army from. The worst part of it all is I still find myself looking at dishes and glassware online...I don't need another dish or glass EVER! lol

The DF "dresser" you referred to in the other post is actually a matching tea cart and it has two small drawers and then two shelves where I keep my silver chest, so not much actual storage.

Here is our pantry cupboard to hold *some* of my many plates. It holds a ton of stuff because it's floor to ceiling!

The top holds my stemware and the bottom is for platters and dishware. The middle hides my MW.

Kat :)

Kat, thank you for the sweet comments. Nope the walls aren't VP...they're the only walls left from before the remodel. The back one (behind the cabinet) is hand made wallpaper (I made it) and the other walls are all just paint with two glazes dry brushed over them.

Ok now back to my delima...I did consider the corner cabinet idea, but can't do both corners because of the proximity of the window to the back wall. Would one look a bit too unbalanced?

Kat...mail me the tea cart LOL It might be perfect heh heh
I could only see the top in the pic so I thought it was a short dresser :) I can't wait to have a dining room big enough for a tea cart!

I'd love to have punched into those walls Jan, but I believe the neighbors might complain (they're our fire walls between the units LOL) Which is unfortunate because they're nice deep walls (about a foot thick) so they'd be great for cabinets til the neighbors tried to hang a pic in the back of one LOL. The one on the other wall is a duct wall so it's 9" thick...I do love the storage that added.

I really do need to do a custom piece for the whole wall. I love the set but can use it in the new house so that's not a huge deal. I just wanted to avoid the cost of a whole new build in the dinning room..but I bet that's what I'm going to have to do :(

Can you have a custom, floor-to-ceiling (or close to it) buffet/hutch built in across the entire back wall? It wouldn't have to be very deep. I had one planned for our dining room, but DH nixed taking out our French doors to do it. It would have been with top of the line furniture grade, totally custom mahogany cabinets: closed cabs below; open and glass-doored cabs above with a long flat surface to set up drinks or a buffet, when needed. Something that looks like an antique. Why piecemeal the room with smaller pieces if you can get the maximum storage out of a large built-in piece? That is, if you have room for one and a window doesn't get in the way. On the other hand, you could always move a window over a bit ;^D
Lynn

Have you thought of hanging a rack on/from the ceiling to hang your stemware, freeing up your cabinet space for dishes, etc. You could intertwine it with ivy and lights to make is a feature.

Gail

Gail not a bad idea :) Aside from the room being so small...you'd probably bonk your head LOL (It's really tight when we serve 8 in there).

Lynne...I'm just trying to do a cheap fix for a bit so I don't have to pay for the custom piece until next year LOL That and the contractor isn't free again until the winter and I don't trust DH to oversee the job for me.

I figured out a short term answer...I stacked all of the boxes of unwrapped crystal in the free corner. Not elegant, but it gets them out of the garage LOL