We recently decided that our dining room was a bit of a wasted space - for some reason we all prefer to eat in the living room and with Noah currently weaning we tend to feed him first before the rest of us eat, and he gets bored of being in the highchair for too long...so our current routine is to all eat in the living room, meaning the dining room was a completely unused room! We decided it made sense to use the space more efficiently and turn into more a play space for Tyne, to give him a room all to himself (we don't allow him to play alone in his bedroom yet as he isn't allowed to use the stairs alone yet), and it also meant that I didn't have so many toys taking over the living room. We didn't want to make any dramatic, permanent changes such as putting in a more "Playroom" like carpet or changing any wall colours as we want to be able to switch it back to dining room mode easily for Christmas dinner and for whenever we may need it (and I`m sure that once Baby Number 3 arrives and Noah is eating with the family more, it'll make more sense to start using the dining room!) - instead we simply wanted to move the dining table and chairs into storage in the cellar, and move in all of the toys!
This was our dining room before:
And this is it now:
We have a large train table, a little shelf unit for storing Tyne's Take & Play train sets which are the ones he uses the most, a MASSIVE storage chest from Dunelm Mill which is SO deep it holds his Mega Bloks table as well about 50 other toys!, and a little table in the corner for colouring activites, play doh etc.
I'm pretty happy with the room as it is for now as there are no huge changes made but it has plenty of storage, most of the "Big" toys which were so in the way before are now stored in here, and it will be super easy to just move them out and bring the dining table when we want it... and it's so nice to just close the door on it at the end of the day and not worry too much about how it looks - and I can go into my nice tidy, clutter free living room and reeeelax!!!
I think I'll miss it when it's time to bring the dining room back!
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