Living and dining room, sitting in a tree, K-I-… Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. At all. Or does it?
In our case, it does, as they are practically one room. So we treat them as one as well.
The previous owners had it set up to have the dining room against the street, then the living room in the middle, and the kitchen in the back (where we have it as well). This worked for them, because that generation was raised with the idea that day-to-day living happened in or around the kitchen, and the dining room was for special occasions only (or for when they had visitors). Times they are a-changing though. We opted (from the very beginning) to swap those two destinations. As we intend to use the dining room a lot, it made more sens to have it adjacent to the kitchen, instead of having to go through the living room every time. And so we did. The end result has always been the floor plan available in the tour.
Once you know that, the real fun of planning can start.
Layout
Let me get that floor plan I talked about:
In the living room there’s only one space where we can have seating, and that’s exactly where you can see it above: in the left lower corner. The door on the opposite side of the room doesn’t allow seating in that area, it’s just too small. That means that wall will house the tv and other electronics.
The dining room is even more straightforward: table in the middle, cupboard besides it.
Last but not least: we tore down this beast…
… but we’ve always known that we’d replace it with something else. We both like the idea of a fireplace, but this one was huge, and really inefficient (in an open fireplace like this most if not all of the warmth goes up up and away through the chimney). The chimney will be reused, so we are kind of limited in place, but shifting it up to two meters sideways shouldn’t pose a problem. Luckily for us two meters allows us to get it perfectly in between both spaces, exactly where we want it.
That only leaves that wall to get a destination. In our mind this will be a cupboard to size, to house the chimney and to place all kinds of stuff like plates and cutlery, board games, and in general random stuff. It’ll be pretty neat!
To finish the room we want wallpaper. After spending all that time getting rid of it, we found out that our walls are not clean enough to paint them and get a satisfactory result. Add a nice molding on top and it should look sweet.
Technical
Once we knew what was going where, we could think about outlets, switches, and lighting. Switches are going in between rooms and at the door, so there’s three of them in total. I’ve put a single outlet right beneath them, for the vacuum cleaner for instance. In general I try to have an outlet every 2 to 3 meter, and besides those below a switch I always opt to have a double one: rather one too many than the other way around. I also want one where the tv will be, so that we can hang it up without any cables visible.
As far as lighting goes, it’s the same story: all cables to the central location. Since we’re kind of forced to put up a new, slightly lower ceiling, we can use that to hide all cables, and have freedom in what kind of lighs we want. We’ll add some spots, and some chandeliers. And some indirect lighting too!
Given this space, how would you fill it? What choices would you make?