<p>It also depends upon the individual market. In my neighborhood, not having an open floor plan would be the kiss of death for resale.</p>
<p>No dining room or family room in our humble abode. Our previous home had a dining room that was never used. We eat in our kitchen and live in the living room. Kids games are in unfinished but cozy & clean basement **right where the laundry is = no laundry for Mom or Dad to do and boys who know how and have no excuse not to do it :)</p>
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<p>If the other homes in your neighborhood have a living room and dining room, then you will have no problem.</p>
<p>A few realtors wasted quite a bit of time before finally being convinced they couldn’t sell me a house without a “living room” and dining room. A real dining room. And that it had to be large enough to enough to hold a table with the capability to seat at least 12, a buffet, china cupboard and still leave room for moving around the room comfortably.</p>
<p>They kept trying to explain to me how to adapt the open floor plan to my needs. No. Thank. You.</p>
<p>My sense is that the “open floor plan” leads to non-stop TV and raiding the refrigerator! Twin American pitfalls.</p>
<p>A little definition is not a bad thing in our living spaces. </p>
<p>Regarding the formal dining room usage – I am influenced by mom who loved to entertain and always used her china and silver and crystal. Somehow none of it got chipped and I have it now and I use it, too, every chance I get. What is the point of saving it? There’s really no more work involved with setting places for people at the kitchen island, dinette near the kitchen or at the big table in the dining room.</p>
<p>I think that open floor plan living can be incredibly elegant. The most elegant person I know lives in a turn of the century commercial building converted to a loft. The only doors are on the bathrooms. very minimalist. no tv.</p>
<p>I have friends who live extremely well in very modern open floor plans. It just isn’t my thing. This thread is interesting to see how different people use their spaces. I love it!</p>
<p>My son has a loft that’s ultra-open. It’s fine for just him and his gf . . .</p>
<p>We use all of our rooms. Eat in the dining room every day. Live in the living room. Not much extra space. S’s bedroom is evolving into an office/reading room now that he is gone. Many of my relatives in lower cost areas have multiple rooms they basically never use, I don’t think I could bring myself to do that–I’m too cheap to pay to heat space I don’t use!</p>
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<p>alh, are you my twin? I look at dining room tables stuck out in the middle of a traffic zone in “open plan” houses and wonder how anyone could host a dinner party or holiday meal like that. In Portuguese, dessert is called “sobremesa,” which literally means “over the table,” i.e., that which causes people to linger and promotes conversation. But of course, entertaining seems to be a dying art.</p>
<p>Friend of mine built a house with a round dining room sort of in the center of her really huge ground floor. It’s actually very cool. She has enormous round table and had custom cabinetry built into the curved walls. Actually, it’s just wonderful. Her sconce lights are crystal and the fittings are curved to fit the walls. </p>
<p>She’s a trip.</p>
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<p>^^^^Depending on how the open plan is configured, this doesn’t necessarily cause any problems at all. In our other house, the table did not impede flow at all.</p>
<p>sop14 - maybe so - LOL</p>
<p>well, I think it is possible to entertain beautifully in open floor plans - but I like antique houses, furnishings, and my life style is kind of all of a piece. My homestyle inspiration is Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses</p>
<p>I just moved, but both my old house, and my new one, have formal dining rooms, which we use for entertaining. My dining table is the most expensive piece of furniture I own, and I was willing to build, and buy around it. It is round, with leaves that add in to make it larger, but still round. I needed a dining room that will hold it at it’s largest size, which is 84" in diameter. That means the room needed to be at least 13x13. A lot of lovely houses were passed over because the dining rooms were big, but perhaps not wide enough. </p>
<p>We love to entertain, and use the dining room several times a month.</p>
<p>We have an eat-in kitchen with an adjoining gathering room. I use that area for my morning coffee in front of the fire, while watching the birds on the pond.</p>
<p>We use our living room as a family room, with a large tv mounted over our largest fireplace. We also have a media room downstairs, and a rec room upstairs. The room we aren’t sure how to furnish is a cherry paneled study. It also has a fireplace, but the view isn’t as pretty as the gathering room, or the sitting area of the master bedroom, so I’m not sure anyone would use it as a reading room. We are retired, and don’t need a home office. No one in our family plays an instrument. It’s a shame, as the room itself is beautiful, with arched windows and cherry coffered ceilings.</p>
<p>It’s true that because my kitchen is open to the great room, I can entertain 50 easily. I would prefer to have a closed kitchen, though, and cap parties at 20 or 30!</p>
<p>Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending some time looking at ranch houses recently, contemplating my next house, and honestly, some of them just seem like airports–one long rectangle, with furniture stuck in zones. Unless they happen to open up to gorgeous views like in California, I find them really depressing spaces, and I am clearly not in CA, as evidenced by the two feet of snow outside my door.</p>
<p>I actually think it would make my house feel a lot bigger if I knocked down the wall between my living room and kitchen. </p>
<p>I haven’t looked into this as I’m sure it would probably be expensive… But it would really allow me to configure my kitchen differently and add more storage and put in a dish washer. </p>
<p>Sent from my DROID BIONIC using CC</p>
<p>Fender - we looked into doing what you describe, but it turned out the wall was a support wall, so it was a no go. The clever contractor then suggested making the formal living room into a dining room which would then free up the former DR to be a casual sitting/TV space. We wanted to keep a DR because we like to entertain and do have family dinners there regularly. But, by moving the second living (the now casual sitting/TV area) space adjacent to the kitchen, we started using it. Funny how that one little change created a really usable space. Noone ever used the old LR when it was at the front of the house and furnished a bit more traditionally. We have a barn door between the kitchen and the casual sitting/TV so it can be open for entertaining/flow or closed for noise mitigation.</p>
<p>When we redid our kitchen, we wound up putting on an addition that spanned 22’ where the exterior wall used to be. The best way to carry the load was to put in a 18" steel beam with concrete-filled lolly columns down to the foundation. That sounds large, but it is holding up the side of the house and bearing the weight of the addition, the snow load was an impressively large number. For an interior beam it should be a lot smaller.</p>
<p>That part or the project was pretty cheap in the grand scheme of the project - IIRC it was less than $4K for the engineering, steel and installation. Of course everything was open, which made installation easier.</p>
<p>A lot of times the beam can be recessed into the ceiling, so it doesn’t intrude so much (or at all) into the space. You’ll have to get an architect or structural engineer to size the beam and tell you what it needed for support, but it won’t be expensive. At least it wasn’t for me.</p>
<p>The installation was interesting. A truck and 4 burly guys showed up. The four guys carried it (!) to the back of the house and used hydraulic jacks to lift it into place.</p>
<p>We just moved out of a house with a small dining room which did not get used much. We did use the living room to play the piano, listen to music, etc. New house has no dining room. It is an open floor plan, works better for us. Living room is open to kitchen/dining area. We use all three areas (which are really one area) all the time now.</p>
<p>The dining area is big enough that traffic flow is not a problem. It is a great space for entertaining, family dinners or what have you.</p>
<p>I have tons of family antiques, so I always have to have formals. We use them both mostly for holidays and when entertaining (book club, bunco, etc.). I love them… if my parents are here, my mom spends most of her time in my formal living room, she likes the quiet. D13 does most of her homework at the formal dining table, it’s quiet in there, but still close enough to where we usually are that she doesn’t feel isolated.</p>
<p>Our dining room gets used for holiday and company dinners. We will also do puzzles there. The formal living room doesn’t see much use even though it it very nice and calming. I will occasionally read or take the phone in there just to feel like it’s not wasted space.</p>
<p>The house we are moving to does not have a formal living room (our preference) and the formal dining room has a gorgeous view and is better integrated into the living space, so I predict we will use it more.</p>