Shifting Perspectives | My Dining Room

This past autumn was a time of huge interior household shifts. My brother had just passed away and I was needing some serious change. Additionally, my son Charlie, who moves about our house in a wheel chair or a walker, needed more space to circumnavigate the house. I also have some larger goals for the house as they relate to my Radical Homemaking goals. I wrote about it in late October HERE.

Here's an excerpt from that October post:
I'm a form and function kind of girl. I don't care for wasted space or money and in my estimation, a home is a living entity in service of the humans that reside there. Through my Radical Homemaking journey, I've been challenged to look at my home in a new way. If it is truly a unit of production and creation, rather than one of consumption and waste, then where are the empty, unused spaces? Where is waste happening? 


At long last, the house has settled into it's new configuration. I have worked really hard to make each space work for my family and serve our individual needs. The following is a list of what has occurred in my household since September:

- remodeled our hall bathroom for wheelchair access

- retooled our laundry space to make room for the bath remodel

- built a chicken coop and invited chickens to live with us

- moved my sons into the guest room

- moved my studio into my sons' old room

- moved my living room into my dining room

- moved my dining room into my living room

- turned my old art studio into a studio apartment for a co-housing situation and invited a wonderful young couple, whom we dearly love, to come live with us. They moved in this month.


This week, I thought I'd share with you our new, re-imagined communal spaces. Today, let's start with the dining room, which used to be our living room. You can see before photos HERE. I didn't purchase anything new, I simply re-arranged the existing furniture and art to make new spaces.

My goal for the dining room was to create space around the table for Charlie's wheelchair. I also wanted this to be a center of my home, a place where homework, and piano practice and reading can happen. I cleared the built-in hutch of decorative clutter and made it the home base for all of our children's books. The black sideboard was emptied of dishes and instead, I've filled it with all of our games, puzzles and children's art supplies. Everything is on hand for family interaction.

Since I always get questions about where I got stuff, here is my source list.

Sources:

Dining set:  came with the house and then I painted the chairs

Rug: Free from a neighbor

Map: Ebay

Black sideboard: family hand-me-down

Channel back chair:  Bough at Again & Again and then reupholstered

Art: by Leo Posilico - family hand-me-down

Curtains and pillows: Etsy

Piano - gift from a friend who was moving

Big turquoise lamp - purchased from a neighbor

Wall color: Symphony Blue by Benjamin Moore

Turquoise side chairs: Antiques Moderne - a Christmas gift from my husband and brother