I LOVE the idea of a dining room/library combo! I would put a large-ish table in the center of the room that could be used for a work table/dining table when you want it. Then the ceiling fixture wouldn't bother you. A couple of comfy wing chairs or other style at one end and your corner cupboard at the other where it fits. Bookshelves on three sides is great. If you are doing custom, you could have cabinets on the lower parts of the shelves for storage. Of course, it would be easier if you had a picture for us!

I would like to do this-we switched our living room with our dining room (which was too small) and we have the same sort of set up with an antique corner cupoboard made by an ancestor in the mid-19th c. at one end and a sitting area at the other. Fireplace in the center of the house separates the living room and dining room and the dining table is placed in front of it in the middle of the room, but I would dearly love to put shelves along two walls.

I don't have any pics for you, but I think the idea of combining the dining and library functions is absolutely perfect for you. I have seen this done very well with a table that expands from small, like a library table, to large when used for dining and with the extra chairs either stored elsewhere or lined up along the wall. You could line one wall with floor to ceiling bookshelves and still leave enough room for a table and your corner piece, right? However, it doesn't sound like your farm table expands/contracts.

Moving the piano into the room would likely eliminate the dining usage as I think there would not be enough room left. But you could make it a library/music room, with a smaller table and book shelves.

Personally, I love to entertain and we use our dining room often, even for the two of us. You need to decide how to get the biggest bang from the room. Have you queried the rest of your family about what they would like? Either way, it sounds like a fun project!!
Diane

but then again, it might also be weird to have half the family in the dining room and the other half in the kitchen, no? (the dining room is pretty isolated and not really close to the kitchen eating space.) So maybe I could just get by with the card table when we need it.

This is exactly why it will work as secondary seating as the kids get older. You make it seem like a big thrill that they get to eat in another room without all the fussing & correcting of manners & the boring adult conversations. All the fun people will be clamoring to sit in there.

I like the idea mainly using the space as casual office, work space, library but also having a table in there that can be pressed into dining service on a as needed basis. One of my big regrets in life, and I realize I am very lucky if this is one of my big regrets, is buying the DR table & hutch/china cabinet. I should have held out for the table I really wanted and skipped the hutch

I vote for no formal dining room space. Sorry, I don't have any pics to back up my vote.

I love the idea of a library/office. If you mostly use a laptop, you could use your stored farmhouse table as a desk except for those rare occasions when you want more room for dining. Then, you could bring up the extra chairs from the basement and use the room for dining. We have big holiday dinners (around 30 people) and we set up tables all around the house. Some people are in the den, some in the dining room, some in the breakfast room and some in the living room. Nobody seems to mind and people move around and talk to one another anyway.

This is the only picture that I have saved.

Oh, I found another place for you to look at inspiration pictures.

Here is a link that might be useful: More Inspiration

I found one more. This is one of my favorites.

As you go through the stages of raising your family, you'll find that your needs will likely change over the years and what you wish now may be different 5-10 years from now. When my kids were little, we converted the formal DR to a playroom and replaced the chandelier with a semi-flush light fixture. As the kids grew older and no longer needed a playroom, I converted it back to a formal DR. We do as you mention over the holidays with separate seating for adults and kids since we have no one area to seat all. I also use the DR now for serving food buffet style as well as storage for all my dishes and glasses which we use for entertaining.

Of your possible ideas, I also like the idea of the combo DR/library--assuming the room is large enough. As long as you don't add many built-ins or the built-ins you add could serve a variety of purposes you should be fine. That way if ever you decide to change it's purpose and/or wish to sell your house feel it would enhance resell to have a DR you can do so. However, if you don't plan to put a dining table there in the short term, I'd swap out the ceiling fixture to something more suited to your intended purpose of the room. If you don't want a fixture, you can cover up the hole with a simple plate to keep the electrical wire there for possible future use. With CL, it's easy enough to resell what you don't use and or purchase what works for you in the here and now.

Both the idea pictures are great!

Would it work for the way your family lives, and for the size of the room, to surround it in (or line two sides or three sides with) shelves, set the piano in one end, and put a round or small square table in the other end to serve as a game table, overflow seating, and study table?
When we have more people than we can fit into our not-very-big dining room, I put a smaller table in the den or the living room (or both), and then between dinner and dessert, I move half the people from each satellite table into the dining room, and half the people in the dining room to the satellites. That way, nobody feels left out, and it mixes the conversation groups mid-way.

Love the idea too! This past Thanksgiving I accidently (and happily) found out that my drop leaf side table was exactly the same height as my DR table (no eat-in kitchen). I popped up both sides of the table and easily seated 5 more people!

I also love the idea of a library/dining room. The inspiration pictures all look great. My only suggestion would be if you go this route would be to also build in cabinet storage with doors in some of the bookcases. You can never have enough storage!

It makes perfect sense to do what works for you, and in this case, it sounds like a library/dining room would fit your needs. Can you somehow make a dry run without moving the piano? We're thinking of doing the same thing here. Last weekend we had 10 people in our small dining room and we were bursting at the seams, while our 26' LR went unused.

We have the piano issue also (although not a grand!) My plan is to move it to the existing DR and to move the kitchen farmhouse table into that room to make it into an office/music room. DH works from home now and is always working on his laptop at the kitchen table.

Cyn, would you be so kind as to post a pic of what you've done in your home?

Bonnieann, if you'll give me a week to clean it out-we painted a couple of other rooms and everything got dumped (and remains) in the dining room-I will post pics. It really isn't so special-just a 1960 ranch with the spaces repurposed and the sitting room (living room used to be dining room) is only partly furnished. Need to recover an old loveseat or buy a new one. We still don't have window treatments, so it will look unfinished, but that is how it is going to stay for a while I'm afraid. :)

Thank you guys so much for all the advice and inspiration pics! I'm still confused, but now I have stuff to think about!

Part of the problem is that the room is not very big - about 11.5 x 15.5. My piano is a 6'5" grand, so basically, if I move it in there, there's no hope for fitting in a table or dining area (though I'll be freeing up the living room for a "kids table" if I need it). There are a ton of doorways and windows in the room as well which might make building shelves a little difficult. I'm going to post some old pics because my camera is broken and there are all I can find that show the dining room - maybe you guys can guage better than me (I'm terrible at space planning) what I can actually fit into a room like this.

Here is the dining room looking towards the kitchen. We have since closed that pass-hrough window, so now that is a solid wall. That corner is the biggest expanse of solid wall and measures about 5 ft x 7 ft (the former pass through is the 7ft wall). The drywall patch for the pass through still needs some help so this might be a good place to put built ins, LOL! The table you see off to the left is the farmhouse table I had purchsed for the dining room - it has leaves you can insert to make it longer so at the smallest (shown) it measures 3 ft x 5ft and it expands out to a little over 8 ft long. I'm not set on using it - I'm sure I could resell it if I decide to go with something different.

This is the rest of the room. There are two windows on the left wall, with about 46" of wall space between them. The corner cabinet is currently living in the far left corner (again the pics are old so it's not there -- and I'm amazed at how many more toys we have now than when these pics were taken - eek!!!). The computer desk table is not needed downstairs and can stay or I can sell it or use it on the screen porch. The wall where the computer desk is measures a little over 7 ft and the adjoining corner wall is a little less than 4 ft.

So the corner cabinet can move to any of the 3 corners shown in the pics (the last pic was taken from the 4th corner, which is where the doorway is to the kitchen in the first pic).

Any suggestions for where to put built in shelves, a small but expandable table and/or a 6'5" piano are most appreciated! I am, as I said above, awful at spatial stuff - I can't picture anything until I see it in real life. So all guidance is most welcome!

Have you tried floorplanner.com? The basic service is free. You could lay out your room and use their templates to play around with furniture placement. If that's too complicated, you can always draw your room on a piece of quadrille ruled paper. You can also make templates of your furnishings, cut them out and move them around to see what might work best for you.

I think I see about 3.5 of 4 sides to the room. What's to the right of the 7-ft computer table? That would seem to be the side of the room that's 15.5-ft - so is there a large opening there?

I would not put the grand piano in there - too solitary for such a social instrument!

We've done the dining/library thing. Our room wasn't large and our bookcases were. We also had the cases crammed with books (homeschool family). The crammed bookcases always made the room look cluttered. If you could do the library part with more grace than I did, it would work out better. I also love the idea of closed door storage on the bottoms of the book shelves. Less visual clutter that way.

If what it's worth, a year after my youngest graduated from our school, I shifted all the books into his older brother's former room --guest room now-- and made the dining room a dining room.

Guess what? I kinda wish I'd left at least some of the books. lol

Happy figuring it out!

Last year we changed our never-used, small dining room into a library/dining room. We use the room much more now than we ever did before -- recently it has been my "office" for everything related to a renovation of our summer cottage! But we have also played games there, and recently when we had another family here for dinner, the kids ate in the kitchen and we adults ate in this room, and it was really cozy and kind of cool.

What you can't see in these pics -- on the wall opposite the loveseat we have two large Stickley bookcases that take up almost the whole wall. There's also a smallish leather club chair in the corner by the bookcases. I've changed a few things since these pictures were taken, but it's basically like this --

That's an 8 x 10 rug, so you can get an idea of how small my dining room is!

Another vote for the dining/library -- what a GREAT idea!!

Your room would be wonderful with lots of thin and tall bookcases -- and the table in front of the window (for the regular day-to-day desk area -- perhaps invest in a thin monitor) -- and then moved out in the middle of the room for the extra dining space.

JUST for comparison, and measuring and discussion purposes (LOL!)-- my "Billy" bookcases from Ikea are 11 1/2 inches deep. Custom bookcases COULD be this deep -- but fill the entire vertical space. AND you could add extra lighting at the top. (again -- for check the Ikea website for some ideas for the lighting)

Jan at Rosemary Cottage

Thank you so much for this thread!

We have a large informal dining room off of our kitchen. Despite the fact that we've provided desks for our children with the hopes that they'd study and do homework in their bedrooms, they prefer to be at the dining room table. (They are all in high school now, but this has been their preference since elementary school.) Rather than fighting it, I'm clipping some of these posts as inspiration for a re-do on the space. I could TOTALLY make this work for us on a day-to-day basis.

...Pam

I think my DR must already be a diningroom/library, because I have heavily laden bookshelves in every room, but mostly in the DR because it has the most open wall space. Who knew I was such a trendsetter :-)

I can't remember who said "books do furnish a room" but it is a motto I definitely live by. I am an avid reader and can't bear to get rid of any of my books. Whenever I watch one of those design shows where they make people "de-clutter" by getting rid of books that they have already read and then they whittle it down to a handful of matching book covers as decor it makes my blood boil! My husband just doesn't get it (he's not a reader) and I know he'd like me to have less 'clutter' but luckily he doesn't force the issue. (He's probably afraid it would come down to him or the books and he might not win!)