House dash Home: Room Reveal: The Sitting Room

It's been a while since I've done a reveal, but it's about time I catch you all up on the happenings around here.

After we finished the renovations on our "family room" in the winter, we found that we no longer had a good use for our living room. And since I don't like wasted space, especially precious space that's 15% of our home, we decided to repurpose a few different rooms to make them more usable for us.

Today, we'll start with our dining room.

Which is no longer a dining room.

I don't really know what to call this space. Coffee room. The news room. The lounge area. The office (sometimes). The sitting room. Regardless of what I call it, it's earned a spot in my top favorite spaces.

Here's what the dining room used to look like (after we refinished the floors, updated the trim, and opened it up to the kitchen):

Here it is today:

We thought this space might be better utilized as a social area than a dining room. A place to watch the news with that fresh cup of coffee in the morning, socialize with friends while I'm in the kitchen, catch up on that new magazine, or watch the birds nibble on some seed.

I envisioned a larger dining table that could accommodate dinner parties, and this room couldn't handle anything more with out feeling cramped.

So we moved out the old dining table (ahem, sold it), and put the hard, backless barstools in storage. We kept the paint, the curtains and even the crystal chandelier. I just shortened the chain by looping the excess up and tucking it into the light as a temporary fix.

This room definitely didn't come together overnight. We pieced together some of my decor items that I already owned, and added a few new favorite finds over the past few months. It took a while to find each item, but it came together pretty perfectly in the end.

The first item we purchased was the 3 French bistro chairs. We had wanted these for a while, and had compared quality and price for months. When I saw them go on sale at World Market we splurged on 3, and they immediately became the inspiration for the rest of the room.

The last piece to the puzzle is that weathered woven storage trunk in the center of the room. I knew exactly what I wanted, and finally found this at Homegoods this past weekend. I practically threw my body on top of this weathered beauty as soon as I spotted it. I was certain everyone in the store was going after this same trunk :)