Potential

Though hospitality is not one of my spiritual gifts, quality time is one of my love languages. Over the years, I've grown to see the potential of hospitality providing quality time with people I care about.

From a young age, I envisioned having a large home full of the people I love and care about: husband, children, parents, sister and family, and good friends. God has blessed Matt and me with a large home, suitable for entertaining larger groups. Now, I'm interested in outfitting it for gatherings with family and friends.

That's where the dining room comes in...

Come with me and I'll show you.

You can walk with me down the hall...

and we'll pass the main room on our left...

enter the kitchen...

and take a right a bit shy of the refrigerator. 

OR

From the front door...

pass the half bath and coat closet to see this: 

There's another window you can't see on the other side of the picture. This is a shot I zoomed in so you could see the decorative details. 

See that teeny, weeny table? It comfortably seats four, but even as a single girl my larger dinner parties went up to 10 people. Since most of our friends here are married and have children, you can imagine how much room I need at the table. 

All the way back to when I was in sixth grade, I remember drawing extensive sketches of houses on graph paper. Every one of them had a huge dining room with one long table for everyone to gather around. Our dining room is a nice size, but it's not big enough for that!

If, however, you add this...

to the dining room, there's enough space to put a table for 14-16 people :) and a buffet along the wall on the right. As you can see, this room is currently empty. We don't have enough furniture to fill this room and I'm not sure how we'd use it based on our lifestyle anyway.

If I played the piano, it would be a great music room. If we had school aged children, I could use it as a home school room. There is definite potential for this space, but realistically for us, this is wasted space...unless I get a table and extend it from the dining room into this one. :)

Let me show you the dining room from the empty one. This view shows you the one obstacle to making these two rooms one big room: the columns.

You may be able to tell from this picture that the columns in the foreground are closer together than the walls of the dining room. To make room for a table, we may have to trim those columns back. I love the columns. Look at the woodwork. Love it!

Matt does not disagree at all...with any of my thoughts on this. We have had one dinner party at our house and made do with what we had. The most inconvenient and limiting part was the table and seating. As it is, we have two tables that seat 4. We have standing plans with one family (of 5) for dinner and I'm not sure what we'll do to make it work. (Last time I moved two tables with chairs into the dining and extra room...I don't want to do that again!)

As it is, Matt approved for me to buy the table. It's an Amish table with many leaves so the table can be adjusted from seating 6 to seating 16. Since the table is costly, I'm waiting a bit. It may help to get through Christmas first. 

Although I'm still weighing it, I'd love this space set up for company. What we'd need to do other than buy the table, leaves, and chairs is to trim back the columns, add lighting, put in hardwood flooring, carry the woodwork/molding through to the other room and buy a rug for under the table.

If we don't make this one big dining room, I want to put in hardwood flooring, a new light fixture on a dimmer switch and possibly different curtains. I doubt I'll paint this room or the empty room in either scenario.

Clearly, this will be a gradual process and will take a long time to accomplish. In the meantime, we'll start with the table and see how much we actually use it. Sometimes dreams are never realized because they were too idealistic, but after having a few dinner parties in TN I'm hopeful having everything set up and ready to use will promote more frequent occasions.