Ready for a change

Now that the holiday gauntlet has been run, I am ready to get back to more intentionally working on my home.

I did an analysis of our dining room, and its table.  The table is rectangular, homemade, and narrow--the top was originally a homemade door, not made by me. It seats ten at the very most.

The space we have for it is eight feet by nine feet, off the end of our kitchen. If our children were out of their spilling years, I would consider moving our main eating area to the front living room, which is much larger.

When we have company for dinner, we have an extra table of the same height and width, that we can place against one end, out into our living room. It adds two or three more seats to the table.

The first thing I looked at, in thinking about how the table works, was to look up the dimensions of tables that were a bit bigger, and compare both area and perimeter.  Area determines how many things you can put on the table; perimeter determines how many people can sit at it.

We can't really have a longer table in the space we have there. I looked at wider tables, but I realized that the additional perimeter would not be enough to actually provide us with any additional seating; we're better off just bringing out the auxiliary table when we need it.

I also thought a bit about a circular table, but our family would fill it, and there would not be a way to easily accomodate guests.

So I ended up right where I started, keeping our current table.

Later I experimented with turning it the other way in the room. The problem there is that a major traffic path runs through the room. I discovered that the table and chairs took up exactly the same width of the room either way, but the perception of width was greater when the table was squeezing the traffic lane, rather than the baby's high chair. And although moving the table would give better long views to those sitting at the table, it wasn't really worth it.

I am also working heavily on our living room now, and it seemed best to limit the areas of discombobulation for the time being.  As much as possible, anyway; making changes always seems to have a ripple effect and provoke further changes.