Have you ever looked around your house and something just didn’t feel right? You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but you just knew there was a better way? Perhaps a better way to arrange the furniture or a coffee table that just isn’t working? That was me. The only problem was the spot bugging me were two of our main living areas: the living room and kitchen/dining area. The kitchen problem was easy for me to pinpoint. The space was just too cramped. We had a six person dining table in a space that was probably designed for a four person one.

This picture doesn’t quite do justice of how cramped this space is. You’ll just have to trust me, for now.

But, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me so much about my living room. Individually, I liked all the components. I loved the white Ikea slipcover couch and I really liked the style of the “pretty” gray recliner I’d recently bought. Our living room has an odd shape so I tried to fill odd nook and crannies with old trunks and a potting table. Still, the room just didn’t flow well and I didn’t know what else I could do to make it work…at least without spending money trying to buy other things, in hopes that it might fix the problem.

I’ve known for awhile that I would need to eventually fix that dining/kitchen area problem. But I didn’t like my options. To build an addition to our home would be expensive and would be years down the road. There was the possibility of trying to convert our study into a dining room, but I wasn’t sure a bigger table would even fit in there. And, I LOVED that study. It was my favorite room in the house. It was pretty and functional and the one room that did flow well. At least I had a few years before I’d need to do anything about it…or so I thought.

When we decided to foster and then actually found out we were expecting a baby of our own, the reality was our family would soon grow to seven people and that table only fit six. I thought about adding a bench on one side to accommodate three kiddos instead of two, but there was still a glaring problem. Adding the bench wouldn’t help that space feel less crowded.

I brainstormed my options. We were converting our guest bedroom upstairs into a family/media room. Maybe I could move my dining room into the living room and just do away with my downstairs living room? I ran the idea by my sister and she shook her head. “You have have some place for people to sit down and relax when they visit,” she’d said. She was right.

The only option that made sense was to move the living room into the study. But the study was my favorite room in the house (have I mentioned that before?).

The Study: AKA my favorite room.

This all led up to Asher’s fifth birthday party. I’d been going on and on to my husband and sister (and anyone else who would listen) for a couple of months about this idea to move the dining room table into the larger living room area. We had seven adults and eleven children in one small kitchen/dining area trying to get food, eat, maneuver around. After the party, my sister said, “Let’s move everything around.”

I was hesitant because what if I hated it? “We’ll move everything back next week, if you want to,” my husband answered.

So we did it. We totally changed three of our living spaces and I can’t wait to share with you the results.

Until Next Time,

Sharlie