We use the dining room for most every meal.

''Nice'' dishes, glassware, and silver live in built-ins, glassware cabinets, and sideboard in the dining room. Along with everything else - souvenirs, trinkets, priceless ceramic blobs the kids made in preschool, random batteries, a microscope, various large Lego edifices laying siege to each other, and now a landing platform for Imperial troopships, ringed with laser cannon.

Daily dishes, glassware, and silver live in the kitchen, which is a Lego-free zone.

The theory is, for everyday meals we often plate in the kitchen, so might as well keep the everyday plates in the kitchen. Although, we often plate nice meals in the kitchen too.

Salt and pepper mini-grinders live on the dining table, and napkins in the built-ins in the dining room. There are three sideboards in the dining room - two built-in and one free-standing - so there is plenty of plunking or buffet space. Too much, actually. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Serving plates live on the plate rails around the dining room walls, and nicer serving utensils live in the dining room sideboard.

Two thoughts about rushing around.

First, the narrow doorway between the kitchen and the dining room is the most likely place for collisions, and all things considered, it is best if the breakage is of our daily dishes rather than the china. So we want to minimize how much the china gets carried around - in teetering stacks, by some distracted child skipping to his iPod tunes - the daily stuff can break all it wants, I'm not too bothered.

Second, I find the rush is most frantic before the meal, and that's when the collisions and dropsies are most common. After the meal, the guests have left and the kids are somehow absent, so it is just SWMBO and me cleaning up - there's not too much bumping and dropping potential, presuming there's not been too much drinking. So we try to minimize the haulage ahead of the meal.

I find the gallon jug of milk so irritating on the dining table, especially when some feeble-fingered child drops it and milk goes flooding. If I had more inner Martha, I'd serve milk into graceful glass decanters.

In a perfect world, there would be a concealed pump and hard lines carrying milk to dispensers in the dining room.

In a perfect world, I'd have a passthrough to set arranged plates, and a little bell to slap.

Yes, my ''perfect world'' is quite a bit different from my real world. For one thing, there would be no space battles raging while we eat.

I know you are really seeking ideas for "efficient" serving of dining room, but thought I'd chime in. For me, my kitchen is a long galley -- with length running perpendicular to the dining area. They are currently visually disconnected.

Since there is no separate nook or bar in the kitchen we use dining area daily.

I've hated bringing plates full of food, and going back and forth in the kitchen for follow up servings. My (planned) solution is to have a console table (of sorts) set up where I can store place mats, cutlery, condiments and also keep water dispenser and glassware etc. A drinks refrigerator will not hurt. I know it's tacky but sometimes I wonder if I should find a place for a microwave there as well :-)

A friend has warming drawers set up in the dining room. I love the idea, although I think some staging area that is more open and hosts buffet servers (or similar) would be great too! (Currently we keep food on the table for easy access and it really clutters the table).

It requires some plumbing and design so it's not a project that I can undertake on a whim, but this is what I'd eventually like to have.

I too find I have two sets of everything thus introducing redundancy. But for us it kinda worked since before we got married, both DH and I had our own condiment servers and oil+vinegar bottles etc -- so we can now put the duplicates to use :-)

Would love to hear others' preferred way to solve this. Great question and thanks for posting!!

Good responses, guys. Thanks! When my kids were young it was small plastic animals and dinos at supper, plus one daughter thought that under table was as suitable as above table, so we had a lot of lifting of tablecloth to tell her it was time for a couple laps around the outside of the house before returning to her chair. We had a beat-up old Wilton carpet which was wonderful camouflage for kid-spilled food. The holes in it became too prominent and we've replaced it, but I would recommend the strategy for anyone with little ones who doesn't enjoy vacuuming.

You can't see the new-to-me antique dresser in photo: Too tall for plunk space for table, sigh. But fabulous deep drawers for tablecloths--napkins in top drawer, then short, middle and long cloths in descending order. Whoopee!

Lighting is an issue in this dining room--needs more windows. I have a lightweight floor lamp that I pull up to the table for reading or projects. If we redo the fireplace wall, we might put in narrow window on left plus sconces. Overhead chandelier is an oldie and DH won't let me put in high watt bulbs. Candles help during formal meals.

Here the table is extended for April morale meal--8 people. I add a folding table that can seat 6; turning tables sideways and parallel allows up to 18 for sit-down meals in this former living room. The cabinet in front of Atrium door with lamp goes byebye for summer to allow deck access. It once served for plunking/small buffeting on other side of room and still can be hors d'ouvres or drinks surface on window side of room, if I use a big tray.

Photo taken a long step forward from the pocket doorway to kitchen, formerly the home of a monster china cab. Door closes out DW noise, radio, dog, smells when necessary.

[What kind of dope would put a view window and a fireplace side by side in a room to create competing foci? Well, there was somebody.]

We use our dining room daily, too....For schooling during the day, and some meals, and almost all dinners. At this point, the only storage in the dining room holds school materials, but I hope for cabinetry at one end one day, to provide a bit of counterspace and some more storage. But it will probably be for school stuff, since it won't really be as convenient for dining dishes as storing them in the kitchen.

We don't have 'fancy.' Our everyday stuff is literally, for every day and every occasion. We put 2 doorways between kitchen and dining for good, non-collision, flow without an open view of the kitchen from the table.

Our dish storage is at the end of the kitchen nearest the dining room, and one of the doorways lines up with that aisle, so a good direct path for setting the table, and the same path is used to take dirty dishes past the dish storage to the dishwashers and cleanup sink.

The 2ndary doorway leads to the aisle in front of the fridge that holds things like milk and condiments, and is also a straighter path between table and oven, or table and stove.

Between our kitchen proper and the dining room we have a 6'x10' space, with an eating nook on one side of the walkway, and butler's pantry cabinets and counter on the other. That 6' of cabinetry is the most heavily used area of our kitchen. The uppers there hold all our everyday dishes, glasses, and some serving bowls, right across from the kitchen table and as close as any kitchen storage can be to the dining room. Wine and wine glasses live here, too, and coffee is made on the counter. (The base cabs hold kid dishes, food storage containers and wraps, flatware, serving utensils, and boxes of cereal.)

We use that countertop for setting up buffets (brunch for 20, and the like) and at any meal for dishes heading to the dining room. (Only very rarely do we plate food in the kitchen rather than bringing it to the table in serving dishes.) After a meal that counter is used for wrapping up leftovers. If you pass from there through the archway into the working part of the kitchen, the first thing you hit on the butler's pantry side is the refrigerator, and on the eating nook side is the dishwasher. It works quite well.

It would be nice if we had a sideboard in the dining room, too, but the one wall that would accommodate one is where we've placed a long bench instead. We love the bench. It's an old, solid, oak thing that's nine feet long. People come in an ask if it came out of a train station. We're not about to trade it out for a sideboard, even though it means that the inevitable gallon of milk has to sit on the floor during meals.

Since my kitchen and dining room are effectively open to each other (peninsula with eating space the only divider) most of these points are issues for us.

But I had to comment on the space battle dinners and plastic animals at the tables. Just wait till your kids hit cell-phone age. It's a running battle to get them to quit texting for 10 minutes to look at you across the dining room table while eating!

When we use the DR for family occasions, dinner is served family style. I didn't have any extra landing space so I put an old dresser that had been in the basement and covered it with a tablecloth (to the floor). It gives extra space for the salads, pitcher of milk, wine bottles, whatever won't fit on the table. I have a buffet with a hutch in there that stores the good china, good silver, and crystal. I'd like to get a proper serving buffet but am waiting until I decide on a floorplan for the kitchen. If we would decide to pull the wall down between the kitchen and DR, I would probably get a different style of DR furniture (current furniture is traditional cherry) as the furniture style would need to flow together better throughout the first floor. I don't think we'll take the wall down, but will wait and see before spending any $$$ on DR furniture.