Choosing Dining Room Furniture: Balancing Style With Practicality

Dining room furniture says a great deal about you, your family and your lifestyle. Choosing dining room furniture can be an opportunity to express your creativity, enhance your interior designs or simply solve those endless seating problems with either a growing family or an expanding social life. Whether you regularly entertain a dozen guests with a seven course evening dinner, or are entertained by half a dozen young children on a daily basis, your dining room furniture needs to serve several functions.

            The first consideration is to think about what we really mean by ‘dining room furniture’. The basics include a table and chairs, but whilst these alone offer all kinds of combinations and choices, it is also worth bearing mind the other items you may choose to include, such as dressers, sideboards, lamp tables and occasional tables. Contemporary dining room furniture often provides a range of matching sets, so that if your preference is for dark woods with crisp, straight lines, your dining room furniture can match, creating a calm sense of consistency and style. In many cases you’ll be able to mix and match items of furniture for the dining room.

            This is important since you may require plenty of storage, but only a few chairs. Or you may require a large dining table with as many as eight dining chairs, but relatively little storage in the dining room itself. Perhaps you’re looking for more versatility and flexibility, in which case an extendable dining table may be the perfect solution. It’s important to consider the range of choicesbeing offered simply in terms of what is meant by dining room furniture.

            The best way of considering the type of furniture to choose is to consider carefully not just how you use your dining room currently, but how you may wish to use it in the future. Whether you’re buying discount dining room furniture or the more expensive furniture items available, you’ll almost certainly be expecting to enjoy many years of service, which often means thinking about the years ahead. Perhaps you’re hoping to start, or expand, your family, or perhaps your children are likely to be flying the nest soon, letting you enjoy a greater number of social dinner evenings with friends.

            Once you’ve considered the type of uses and needs you’re likely to have, it’s time to consider the style and design choices on offer. From antique style dining furniture to contemporary dining room furniture, and from discount to traditional styles, there are many different options available. Although you may have personal preferences, it’s again worth considering the uses and locations of your dining room furniture, since this may have more of an impact than you might imagine. For example, if you have a relatively small dining room you may find that dark wood such as mahogany, whether genuine or veneer, tend to make the room feel much smaller. If you choose to have sideboards and occasional table or lamp tables in your dining room as well, darker woods can quickly make the room feel close and crowded. Lighter woods can help a room seem larger and more spacious. But of course, if you already have a larger dining room, you may decide that to create a warmer, cosier and more intimate environment you choose the darker woods for that very reason.

            Discount dining room furniture can be available with a range of veneer finishes, providing a number of choices, from pine dining room furniture to the darker, richer wood effects. Whilst discount furniture such as dining tables and chairs may prove cost effective in the short term, if they are likely to experience heavy use, especially with children, then you may decide that solid dining furniture such as pine tables and chairs offer a more robust and hard wearing alternative.

            But when it comes to choosing your dining room furniture you should also be considering other ways in which your dining room can be designed and styled with items that will help compliment the choice of woods or wood finishes. If you choose a darker, mahogany or walnut finish dining table, you may find that bright yellow or orange table mats or napkins help to create a vibrant, warm and very striking Mediterranean feel. Pine furniture suits white or cream perfectly, although zesty citrus colors can create a spring like sense of freshness.

            Lighting, too, is very important, and depending on whether you’re looking to create a brightly lit family room where the children can do their homework on the dining table, or to create a more cosy sense of intimacy with low lighting, you will need to consider whether lamp tables may help to enhance the mood and style you’re aiming for. Choosing dining room furniture is about far more than simply where you’ll eat your dinner!

Planning Your Kitchen: Five Ideas for Layout

While planning for a kitchen, you begin to make more detailed plans from your preliminary sketches, you want to be sure you will be making a highly functional kitchen, one that will be pleasant, efficient, and physically comfortable to work in. finding good-quality and appropriate cabinets, appliances doors, and other items is important. But putting them in just the right configuration, with is even more crucial. Here are some useful ideas.

            First of all, don’t assume the window has to be over the sink; you may want storage there. The window can be above the main work counter or elsewhere.

            In a tight space, inches matter. A 30-in-wide mix-center counter feels much bigger than a 27-in. one, and a 33-in. one feels positively huge. If passageways are narrow, recessing the refrigerator 3 in. can make a big difference. Taking pains over small dimensions will definitely pay off.

1. The “work center” concept

            Perhaps the most important of these concepts is that of the work center. The basic idea is that any work station – whether a carpenter’s bench or a kitchen work area – should be set up to accommodate the specific details of the work to be performed. Work surfaces should be placed at the correct height and made of the most appropriate materials. Tools and supplies that go with the work should be handy but not in the way. And the best and most convenient storage locations should be allocated to the tools and supplies used most frequently.

            Basic Work Counters: A distinct cleanup center, mix (food prep) cleanup center, and cooking center are the basic building blocks of a good kitchen layout.

            Early kitchen researchers defined three primary kitchen work centers reflecting three different sorts of kitchen work: cleanup, mixing, and cooking. The cleanup center includes the sink, a place to stack dirty dishes, probably a place for a drainboard, cleaning supplies, and often storage for everyday dishes. Today, the cleanup center would usually include a dishwasher. A trash can is essential, and the countertop should be waterproof or water-resistant. A cleanup center may also be a place for good preliminary recycling. The mix center (or food-preparation center) should be organized around the premier work counter, with easy access to favorite knives, utensils, bowls, and small appliances, as well as so the most frequently used supplies, such as oil, salt, flour, and such sometimes butcher block is used here, though many people prefer movable chopping boards. The cooking center includes the stove, another counter, a heat proof place to set down hot dishes, and tools and supplies used primarily at the stove, such as pots, pans, lids, spatulas, pot holders, and perhaps spices.

            Today we cook very differently than early researchers did, but these three basic and relatively distinct work are still helpful design building blocks. Many designers rightly add a fourth function, the serving center, which is often near the table. It has a place to set hot pans, and it houses serving dishes, perhaps the good tableware, and napkins. Many cooks also define other centers for inclusion, particularly a baking center. A message center might be as simple as a wall phone with a pad of paper, but it could be large enough to include a desk with a computer for doing homework and paying bills, you kitchen might be light enough to include a recycling center, where newspaper, bottles, and other recyclables can be organized on their way out of the house. As I survey and evaluate any kitchen layout, locating the basic work centers on the plan.

            Cleanup center: lets start with the cleanup center. It has, of course, a sink, usually (but not always ) 25 in. or 33 in. wide. There is at least a 2-ft-. –wide counter on one side for dirty dishes, and a similar 20-in . or wider counter on the other side for a drainboard. A dishwasher is 24 in. wide; in most new kitchens, a space for it will be needed beneath one of these side counters.

            Mix center: for some very tidy cooks, this food-prep center can be as little as 30 in. wide but more often is 36 in. to 60 in,. wide. It should be handy to booth sink and stove. It might be an island, but it’s often a counter between cleanup and cooking. It can’t be the same as the counters at the sink, which are routinely covered with dishes, nor any other counter that’s occupied by a microwave, big mixer, or other gear.

            Cooking center: most stoves are 30 in. wide, though some commercial models are 30 in. or more. If a hood is desired, its helpful (though not essential) to have the stove on or near an outside wall. The cooking center should have its own counter. This counter should be at least two feet wide, preferably more. It is often the place where a second cook can work.

            Don’t position the side of a stove right up against a wall. The heat from the burners can burn the wall. Also, avoid a location adjacent to a hallway or walking space, where kids or others walking by might accidentally knock over a hot pan. If the stove is in an island or a peninsula, make sure it is protected at the rear, either with a raised back or by a counter at least 9 in. wide.

            The refrigerator: Although the refrigerator is sometimes included with one or another work center, it makes more sense to think of it as a separate element. A refrigerator is big and bulky, so it doesn’t work well in the middle of a run of cabinets. lt’s usually placed at the end of a run, sometimes in combination with a tall pantry unit of some kind.

2. The food-flow idea

            When possible, it’s good to locate the work centers in the right sequence based on the way food is processed. To oversimplify, food comes in the back door, gets stored in a pantry or the fridge, gets taken out again, is washed up at the sink, chopped up at the mix center, cooked, then served. If the work centers are more or less in that order, kitchen work will be easier, with fewer wasted steps.

3. Standard kitchen layouts  

            Most of us are familiar with the standard kitchen layouts that have evolved: the U, L, galley, one-wall, island, and peninsula. The peninsula, supposed that it is simply any layout without a wall behind some of the cabinets, while both the peninsula and island schemes can be thought of as variations on the U-layout. Although there are endless variations and elaborations, most kitchen fall into one of these models.

            U-layouts make a lot of sense. They concentrate a complete work area in a compact space, with little through traffic. The peninsula and island versions allow for sociability, and they often connect the workspace to the dining or family space nearby.

            The l-layout is simple, handy, and efficient. It’s also compact in a special sense. Where the u-layout require a distinct space of its own, an l-shaped kitchen can be simply the edge of a larger space. For that reason a small space often calls for an l-layout. The galley layout is quite efficient if the aisle is 3 ft. to 5 ft. wide. The disadvantage is that the aisle is usually a traffic lane, which can disrupt the cook. The one-wall layout is not ideal; it results in a lot of walking and would be used where a better option is impossible.

4. The work –triangle test

            The work triangle, devised in the early 1950s as a test for kitchen layouts in government-financed housing, specifies an optimal relationship between the sink, stove, and refrigerator. The idea is that if these are too far apart, there will be needless extra steps while cooking. If they are too close together, work centers will overlap, and you’ll have to constantly walk around the appliances to get to your work area.

            A pantry this size can be buried in the wall. I have often recessed refrigerators, shelf unit, and microwaves into walls to save space.

5. The power-kitchen idea

            In kitchen remodeling, it’s sometimes impossible to devise a perfect layout. This has been true of many of the houses I’ve lived in and fixed up. But there is another insight from kitchen research that I’ve found useful. Most of the little journeys in cooking are from the sink to the mix center and back, from the stove to the mix center and back, or between the sink and stove. There are significantly fewer trips to the fridge, table, pantry, or back door. That means that if you can establish a mix center or main work counter that is within about teo or three steps of both sink and stove, and maybe even directly between them, the kitchen can be efficient, even if other features of the layout are less than ideal.

            Put another way, you can live with having the fridge, pantry, or table a short walk away, or having the basic units out of the ideal “food-flow” order. But if the main work counter is a hike from the sink or stove, or if those appliances are too widely spaced, your kitchen will be inconvenient to use no matter what else you do.

Power kitchen

            An imperfect layout can work as long as there is a nice generous counter space handy to both sink and cook top. Here there is no counter space at the stove, the left sink counter is cramped, and the refrigerator is too far from the food prep-area. But the main food prep counter  the power kitchen area is big enough, is very handy t both sink and stove, and has supplies, tools, and a trash can near at hand. So it is still quite an efficient kitchen to work in.