#Microblog Monday 209: Unused Space
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There was a fascinating article earlier this summer on unneeded spaces in houses that pointed out this fact from a study:
Nobody is actually using their formal living and dining rooms. Families actually spend most of their time in the kitchen and the informal living room or den. Yet we continue to build these wastes of space because many Americans still want that extra square footage.
Okay, it’s a very judgy article, but it does make a point. When you take a step back and look at homes, it’s a bizarre idea to keep a living space that you seldom use when rooms that get continual use can be changed to accommodate entertaining. And it’s also true that entertaining is emotional; inviting people into your space is emotional.
We don’t have a second living room or a dining room. I’m curious how many people who have them use them on a daily or weekly basis.
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18 comments
Really interesting article. When we bought our first house last year, the prior owners had converted the formal dining room into a laundry/mudroom/craft space and the “formal” living room had been walled off to create an office at the front of the house. We use what was originally designed as a breakfast nook and expanded a little as the dining space. At first, I was a little hesitant about not having a formal living/dining room (just as the article points out), but having lived here for about 6 months, I LOVE the way the space wound up. The kitchen/dining/living room are open to each other, creating a marvelous big space for the kind of usual informal entertaining we do. The main floor laundry (as opposed to where it was originally, in the basement) is fantastic. The laundry room has my desk and extra storage space for pantry items, cleaning items, and I use it for crafting as well. We also sometimes shove larger things into it if we need the extra space in other areas for entertaining. The former “formal” living room has turned into our den/library/sleeper sofa space. We love it! So nope, no formal living/dining rooms here, but we don’t miss them.
No extra spaces for us. Our downstairs is an open kitchen that flows into the livingroom/area (plus a toilet, tiny entryway (vestibule?) and coat area). Upstairs is 3 bedrooms and the bathroom (toilet, shower, sauna). I definitely don’t miss or need another room to clean.
My inlaws have a formal dining room that segues into a…den(?) and a kitchen where we eat most meals. The formal dining room is only for xmas dinners. 😀 But their house is older and a house, which could be why it has more spaces. We live in a duplex, much smaller and very much newer.
Very true. Our old house was only about 1200-1400 square feet, but there was space designated as a formal dining room. But there was also a dining nook in the kitchen, and that’s where we ate. The “dining room” wasn’t that big anyway — we didn’t entertain much and we didn’t have the furniture. It wound up housing our piano & an extra sofabed. When we started talking condos, dh pointed out that, even in that smallish house, there was a lot of space that we didn’t use. We had three bedrooms; one was an office where only the desk in it really got used, and one was supposed to be the nursery. It wound up being a spare bedroom that only got used when we had company, which was not often. We rarely spent time in the basement, except to do laundry, and likewise did not make a lot of use of the big backyard. It was nice to have some extra space around us, but as JustHeather pointed out above, all that space has to be cleaned & heated, etc.
In our current 874-square-foot condo, there’s not much space that goes unused. 😉 Probably the least used space is the second bedroom that we use as an office/library. I suppose we didn’t really NEED a second bedroom (obviously, the extra space means higher fees, taxes & heating costs) but I wouldn’t have been able to keep very many of my books otherwise (perish the thought!!) — and it’s nice having a bit of extra space around us. (Nine-foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows help contribute to the feeling of spaciousness.) I know my mother was/is not impressed that we don’t have an extra bed “for company,” but when we thought about it, she hasn’t been here to visit us in nearly 10 years (!), nor have we had any other overnight guests. We definitely get more use out of the space as an office/library. 😉 If & when someone does show up, there are two guest suites in the building we can rent at rates that are much cheaper than local hotels. We did look at one (more expensive) condo that had a more defined dining space, which would have been nice, but again, we don’t entertain a great deal. We have a small round table in a combined open-area kitchen/living room/dining space, and if we have guests, we have extra leaves to expand the table; we would just have to move the easy chair back to accommodate it. No big deal.
Ha ha ha
No extra rooms here. Family/living room room adjacent to our small kitchen, with our dining table on the kitchen side of the family room (separated by stairway).
I completely agree with the article about it being wasted space! Our last house had a huge formal living and dining room. They were lovely. They took up half our lower level. And we never used them. Not once. I think the only time I went in the dining room except to clean it was shortly after we moved in and I saw a leak coming from the ceiling. We lived there 7 years. Did not use it once. Our current house is about 400 square feet smaller and most of that is probably from losing those 2 rooms. Although, we do have a loft in this house that is a second living area upstairs by the bedrooms. Still, we aren’t formal dining people. We seldom eat at a table even and having the open great room informal dining space is much more fitting for our lifestyle. Our loft is probably still an extra room although it’s supposed to be where my husband works. He doesn’t.
Our formal living room/dining room combo is one large play room for my girls. They have toys, books and a small table in there. We have a comfy couch plus a table for puzzles or LEGO. It’s where we spend most of our time when we are home and they are awake. The family room is where we watch TV after they go to bed and where we sit when guests come over. It’s how we avoid having wasted space and I love having the separation between kid stuff and adult space.
Like many others, we don’t really have those spaces (separate living and dining areas for guests), but I wish we did — I think we’d do more hosting/entertaining. I’d particularly appreciate having separate “kid” and “adult” areas. That said, I get the (environmental/land-use) argument against having little-used spaces, so there’s that.
Our first house as a married couple had an open floor plan through the living area, dining area and kitchen, with no separate formal living or dining room. In our current house — where we have lived for almost 14 months — the front door opens into what is supposed to be a formal living and dining room.
We currently use the front room very little: I have bookshelves in there with my books, and a sectional couch, with the goal of making a “reading room,” but in reality, I hardly ever spend time in there. (We did display our Christmas tree in that room last year and hold the magic show that was part of our sons’ birthday party in the room.) I eventually intend to put a piano in there as well.
One of my sons calls the front room “the room we don’t use.” He and his twin brother play in there occasionally (when they aren’t playing in their loft playroom upstairs) and sometimes ride a skateboard on the tiles, but apart from seasonal use, he’s right: we don’t really use the room.
I will say that if that front room was decorated and equipped to be what it’s supposed to be — a formal living and dining room — we would probably use it even less. When we host friends or family, they sit at our kitchen table or on the couch and chair in our family room.
I’m a fan of minimalist spaces so the idea of a “formal” dining/lounge wasn’t even our consciousness when we got our house. So… our place is small. We don’t even have a dining table indoors (just stools at the kitchen bench+ outdoor tables for when we have guests). That being said we do have a small bedroom that is rarely used, essentially it has become “the cats’ bedroom”.. a little reminder that filling the bedrooms with more family members IS part of our consciousness…
We have a formal dining room and a library. We use every single space in our house.
When all 4 of us are home for dinner (most evenings during the week), we eat in the dining room. Breakfasts and lunches are more haphazard, and we tend to eat those meals (not always at the same time) in the kitchen.
We don’t have extra space either. I always thought it was weird to have that fancy room no one ever went in. Even growing up the house had those separate rooms but they weren’t used like that. I had been in friend’s houses that had that and I never understood it. I feel like that was what rich people did for show, because it’s not practical otheriwse.
My house has a set up where you would have the “formal” rooms if you were only like a family of 2, but the kitchen isn’t big enough for more than a small table in the first place so I don’t know how it would work. The people we bought the house from had it set up that way but it wouldn’t ever really work for us. All of our space is liveabke and functional!
Joining the crowd by saying that we don’t have those extra spaces (damn, one can imagine), but I grew up in houses that had both a formal living room area and a dining room area. Those parts of the house were always unoccupied save for the cats (they loved claiming these spaces). On top of this, my parents finished both basements in their homes and those spaces also were fairly under utilized.
That said, both these homes were in the midwest where housing is insanely cheap given that population density is extremely low. I think that makes a huge difference as there isn’t pressure to downsize as people aren’t living on top of one another. Hence old traditions and value systems are slow to change given that there isn’t an urgent need for space the same way there is in major coastal cities.
And now you have me dreaming of my childhood, spending Sunday afternoons quietly sleeping in the formal living room (where I knew no one would bother me)…
Completely agree. As immigrants my parents couldn’t fathom why people would spend money on space that they rarely use.
I think if you entertain a lot (and the people you entertain are colleagues/acquaintances), then yes, having a formal space makes sense to me. Otherwise, I’d just repurpose the space into, say, a library/study 🙂
The house I grew up in was 1400 sq ft, and had a formal living room. I guess the other room on the main floor was supposed to be a bedroom, but we used it as our formal dining room/family room/TV room/extension of the kitchen. Originally, the kitchen was enclosed and had room for a small table…but when I was probably 5, they took out half the wall, put a counter in and opened up the space to make the kitchen and the dining room seem bigger. Anyway, that’s where we all congregated, because unless you’re using some portion of 2 rooms, there’s not a lot of space for 6 people to gather regularly. My husband grew up in similar circumstances, except they had a finished basement and 8 people.
So now, we have a 2200+ sq ft house for the three of us. We built it before we knew how many of us there would be. But we have an open floor plan so we’re pretty much always all together – even if I’m cooking, and my kid is watching TV, and my husband is doing a jigsaw puzzle on the dining room table. And really – we use the spaces, because the dining room table doubles as the craft table. Or the present-wrapping table.
OTOH – our basement is partially finished and we rarely go down there. But, it’s the basement. It could be just a giant storage area that no one ever visited either.
When we did our remodel, we changed our floor plan, getting rid of our formal living and dining rooms (which we rarely used) in favor of a large open space. We planned areas for different functions (like eating, watching TV, reading) and made the kitchen the center of the space. We now use every square inch. I don’t think formal dining and living rooms are modern; the vast majority of people don’t entertain enough and those rooms go unused in most cases. We actually have people over a lot more now, and the open flow is more functional for that!
Our formal dining room is the Lego room. It is attached to the kitchen through the butler’s pantry. I like that the kids can play in there and I can see them while making dinner. We clear the table off for holiday meals, but the room doesn’t go unused. I’m just bad about trying to use it for other meals when when have people over. We usually just sit at the kitchen table and around the island. Our office is the play room, but we will convert it back to a home office when the massive piles of plastic toy aren’t consuming our lives anymore. My kids are 4 and 2×2 right now.
We have a formal dining room and eat in kitchen. Dining room is my music teaching studio/practice space with amazing views of the SF Bay. We also have a small table in the rounded tower windows of the dining room and eat there every day! I love having a formal and informal eating space, we use both daily. The dining room is very multi-purpose and is a play room as well. Of course our space is small by US standards, 1200 square feet apartment with 3 bedrooms. No wasted space here!