What do you do with a formal living room

[Wendy31]

Our current house has a living room, dining room, eat-in kitchen, family room, & basement rec/play room.

The living room is to the right as you enter the foyer, & there aren't any doors to close it off. It's nice & sunny w/ a bay window. We have lots of books, so DH made a set of bookcases to go along the back wall. W/ the trimwork, the finished shelves have a "built-in" look which is nice. The furniture is all casual because we're not "formal" people either - it's more of a sunny reading/sitting room than traditional, formal living room. DH & I will often sit in there in the afternoons & talk. I'll read in there, &, often, I'll find the kids in there reading or doing schoolwork as well.

Through a doorway in the living room is the dining room, & then the dining room has a doorway into the kitchen. The foyer, living room, dining room, & kitchen sort of make a circle - our youngest DS likes running laps in the "circle"! LOL! The dining room is small-ish (only room for a 6-chaired table & china cabinet), so I'd like to take the wall down between the dining room & living room to open it up some.

Our kitchen is open to the family room which is 2 steps down from the kitchen - which I love! I can be in the kitchen & still be a part of what's going on in the family room, which is where we spend most of our time.

We use the basement space as a play/rec room & school room (we homeschool) - it's a walkout basement, so it's not as "dark" as some are. We also exercise down there.

While the rooms are perfect for us, entertaining is a little difficult - because, while we have the traditional rooms, they're smaller & configured in such a way that the 2 main living areas (the front living room & the family room) don't flow naturally together - w/ the kitchen kind of "dissecting" the dining & living rooms from the family room. Additionally, there's not a good way to set up food for a party - I normally either set up the platters/dishes on either our kitchen or dining room table. For example, I'd love to host a baby shower for my niece, but I'm not sure how I can work out the "logistics" of fitting everyone all together in one space, if that makes sense.

Anyway, we use our living room as a casual, sunny sitting room or library. One of my favorite things anyone has ever said about our home is when my 6 year old niece told me, "Your house looks like a condo at the beach!" (My decorating "theme" for our house is "seaside cottage," so her comment made my day!)

 

[CdnCarrie]

Our basement is big, open and raised so not really completely underground. It has huge windows and is bright. I LOVE being on a seperate level then my kids. They are so dang loud sometimes. My kids are older though at 6, 10 and 13 so no babies to keep an eye on. Me and DH love hiding out in the basement away from the kids sometimes

My basement is also big, open and raised as it's a split level. And we paid extra to the builder for very large windows. Still don't like being down there. i send my husband down there when we can't agree on what to watch on the living room tv.

I'm sure the kids will migrate down there eventually. Right now they prefer the big screen in the family room.

 

[BadgerGirl84]

I turned mine into my office. I have two Ikea Hemnes bookcases with glass doors on either side of my desk with two comfy chairs in the room. Much more functional that way. I do my work in the daytime when no one is around.

 

[MIGrandma]

We used to have a living room and I do miss it. In 1987 we added on a 24'x24' family room on the west side of the house so then we rarely used the living room. We still had a hide-a-bed couch in there, chairs, stereo, etc. but it rarely got used. About 12 years ago we turned it into an office for DH, but I do miss having another "quiet place" to go to if I want to read and DH is watching a TV show in the family room.

We do have a "front door" in the office but it faces the road and we don't use it. The side door, in the dining room, faces the driveway so that is the "main door" that some people use. I say some because our friends and family all know to go to the back door.

 

[mamasuf]

Since my house is older (1970) my living room is huge. It seems in newer homes, they realized that they are rarely used and make them much smaller. We imagined it would be used for parties but when we do have a party, everyone is always in the family room anyway. I can honestly say I go in my living room, except to dust, maybe once every three months. We do have a piano in there and my daughter plays several instruments so they are strewn around one end of it. She is really the only one who uses the room. My formal dining room is used maybe 3 times a year for parties. Really is alot of wasted space.

 

[Janepod]

I love our formal living room. It's on the other side of the house (we have a center hall colonial) from the kitchen, den, etc., so it's very quiet. No tv. I go in there often to sit and read without distractions, make a fire, just chill out. And of course it gets a lot of use whenever we have guests.

 

[Debbie7452]

We have one. It is still void of furniture after 5 years of living here! There is a beautiful fireplace and bay window. It is our Christmas tree room. If I turned it into something else, I would have trouble at Christmas time...

My boys use the space it to wrestle...not really what I envisioned when we moved here. Our space is connected to our family room with French doors which I leave open all the time because the family room would feel cramped if they were kept closed. I am kind of embarrassed to have a fancy, but empty, room.

 

[minniecarousel]

We use our dining room as a living room and the living room as a dining room. When we remodeled our kitchen, we had the contractor make a doorway from the kitchen into what is now the dining room. they added a chandelier in there too. So now the living room is a small "sitting room". It really only gets used when family is over. I agree that many living rooms are wasted space.

 

[Liberty Belle]

Yes and I love it. We use ours more as the grown up living room. There's a tv in there and we can send the kids to the family room to watch a movie while we watch one in there.

 

[DVC-Don]

We converted our formal living room into a formal dining room. Then we extended our kitchen to include the old dining room (huge kitchen now). We already have a family room and a finished basement for family to gather, although it seems everyone gathers in the kitchen.

 

[Lilliputian]

We use ours for lots of bookshelves and the piano. There's also a small circular table that can turn into a larger, oval table when we have lots of people over for meals. I call it the library, but no one usually does their reading in there. They just get a book and leave. The kids use the table for projects like puzzles, origami, etc.

 

[PollyannaMom]

Well, I usually fold laundry in mine.

We're just not formal people. We use the family room that's connected the kitchen for TV, games, etc. - so the sofa and love seat in the "living room" are conveniently empty, and I end up landing the clean laundry baskets there when I bring them up from the basement.

We do have three bookshelves in there, so I guess we're well on the way to "library". And I did always want one...hmmm.

 

[NMAmy]

If I had a formal living room (I don't), I would make it into a library with floor to ceiling shelves, a nice desk, some comfy wing chairs, etc.

Great minds think alike. This is exactly what we did. As you enter our front hallway, to the right was a formal living room and to the left was a family room with a fireplace and and attached sunroom which doubles the size when we open the french doors. Even when dd was at home, there was no real reason for two living areas right next to each other--especially since we have another family room in the finished basement with another fireplace.

For my birthday a few years ago, DH built floor to ceiling bookshelves on three walls. Best birthday gift EVER! I have a few chairs and a table along with a china cabinet and a Duncan Phyfe table. When we have a big group for dinner, the chairs are moved downstairs and the leaves are put into the table and we use it as a dining area. We get way more use out of it now than we would have as a formal living room or using it simply as a formal dining room.

 

[Chelley00]

We made ours into an office/library/scraproom/craftroom.

And the kids use it as a soccer room because it's the most open floor space

 

[goofy!]

We're not planning on moving for another year-ish, but I just love looking at real estate sites like zillow & realtor.com for ideas of what I'd like, what we can get in our price range, etc.

The style of house we'd like to get is an older (1900s-1920s) two story with a walk-up attic. These are plentiful in our city & it seems like quite a few people have added onto the back of these houses to create a larger "family room" and bathroom for the first floor. That leaves the original formal living room in the front. We're NOT formal people... I can't ever imagine having a room full of nice furniture just for sitting with company or special occasions. I wouldn't know what else to do with this room though. Originally, I thought play room or office as we could certainly use both... but it would look odd to open the front door and step right into DH's office or a disaster of a play room.

Do you have a formal living room? What purposes do you use yours for?

While our house isn't older, we do have room, both a living and family room. Our family, a great room off the kitchen, is where the tv is. We gather there to do, well, family things. We watch movies, play games, etc.

Our living room is mainly used a a "quiet" room. We read in there or work on our laptops, etc. It is not unusual to see the kids curled up on couches with their kindles and the parents on their laptops or iPads.

Also, since the kids are older and have friends in the family room, it is a nice getaway for the adults.

It is also used to entertain neighbors and friends since it connects to the dining room.

The dog also uses it to watch out the window to make sure the cul-de-sac is protected.

We have a separate office, so don't need to use it for an office.

I didn't think we would use the room much, remembering all my friend's parents having "stuffy" formal living rooms. But I am surprised how much we have made use of it.

 

[Liberty Belle]

If we had a basement rec room and an upstairs sitting room, plus the family room and formal living room, like another poster said she had, we most likely would be using the formal living room as a library. I suppose if she has/we had a library, too, it would be used more like a parlor or sitting room for guests we do not know well (which means it would probably only get used once a year or so - I'm thinking salesmen and such).

 

[jetskigrl]

My house doesn't have a formal living room (it is too small, only has one "living" area). But the house I grew up in and my Mom still lives in has both a living room and a family room.

The front door opens up with the formal living room to the left, the L-shaped staircase in front of you and the formal dining room to the right. If you go through the dining room and turn left, it leads to the kitchen. Both the formal living room (and down a small hall to the right) and the kitchen open up to the family room. Those areas wrap around the staircase and meet on the other side.

The formal living room has two sofas, a piano and a fireplace. It is only used when there is company or family staying over and more space is needed to hang out. Otherwise everyone always hangs out in the kitchen/family room area. There is a long open counter between the kitchen and the family room so it all kind of connects. The living room, on the other hand, is more cut off from the other areas, which is another reason why it isn't used as much.

 

[DMickey28]

We have two "living room" spaces. I suppose the front one is our "formal living" room. We use it more in the winter time because it's warmer. The other room is a large room that we call the playroom that has couches and tv and the toys in it. The people we bought the house from used the front room as a formal and the second room as a family room.

Our living room is just to the right of the front door when you walk in.

 

[runwad]

I love my formal living room. When the kids were smaller I hung out with everyone in the family room, now that they're all older, the formal living room is my room. I'm up here every night reading or on the computer. I love reading the Sunday paper up here with all the sunlight coming in the windows. Usually everyone creeps up here with me and I"ll have to remind them this is the reading room so it needs to be quite. My mom did the same thing always read in the living room while dad controlled the tv in the family room, so it seems normal to me. Plus I have a big extended family so we always have holidays and family get together's and it's nice for the people who want to talk to be in this room and away from the noise of the tv.

 

[JessicaR]

Do you have a formal living room? What purposes do you use yours for?

You asked. Ours is used as a train room. My husband built an entire room based around trains.