Do you have a dining room? Is it a deal breaker if you don’t?

[Melaine]

I have never had a dining room. If we did have one I would probably use it as something else. School room maybe.

[PZMommy]

We do not have a dining room. Our house was originally set up for a combo living room/dining room combo (but no wall or partition). We have no real use for a dining room, so we use the entire area as a living room. As long as I could fit a table in the kitchen, I'd be fine.

[jgenie]

Not having a dining room wouldn’t be a deal breaker for me. We have a dining room and a large kitchen with a table and a large double island with high chairs. We eat at the island 99% of the time. We only eat at the kitchen table if we have guests as the island only seats 4. We use the dining room when we have more than 6 people as the kitchen table only seats 6 people.

[okinawama]

We have a dining room, never use it, and would prefer a house with an eat in kitchen.

[Liziz]

I'm a little unsure whether you're asking "would it bother you to not have an eating area that is totally separate from the kitchen area" or if you're asking "would it bother you to have an eat-in kitchen with sufficient space, but not have a separate dining room?"

In two of our houses, we've had eat-in kitchens (like what you have pictured) where the kitchen table is set up with sufficient space, but in the same room as the kitchen. In both of those houses we've also had a separate dining room. The eat-in kitchen is where we'd eat 99.9% of the timing, only using the dining room for a holiday dinner now and then. In our first house the dining room didn't even have furniture for the first year!

I have no issues with an eat-in kitchen. It works really well and is convenient. The only reason not having a dining room would bother me is that we now have a nice dining room table that would be homeless without a dining room! If I didn't have that it wouldn't bother me in the slightest to not have a dining room.

The thing that would bother me about the kitchen you posted is that it seems to have minimal usable counter space. But you could easily put an island in that kitchen (it appears from the pictures) and gain the counter space (I'm thinking of the movable furniture like islands, not a big remodeling job -- more something to get you buy until you can do the peninsula remodeling job you described).

[WatchingThemGrow]

As a family of 5, I would want to have room for another family of 4-5 to dine with us...and we routinely do. Our eat in kitchen area didn't fit our family well, so we used the dining room daily. Now that we took down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, we use the dining table all the time.

[TwinFoxes]

A lack of a dining room isn't a deal breaker, but that lay out looks a little funky, not in a good way. But it's hard to tell for sure.

[KrisM]

We have a dining room that we use daily for dinner. Breakfast/lunch is at the counter. Our eat-in part of the kitchen is small and the main path to the family room, so no table in there at all. As long as I had a good place for all of us to eat together I don't care what the room is called. I don't need to places.

[cvanbrunt]

I have a dining room and it is a deal breaker. Not because we use it a ton but no dining room usually equals open floor plan and I hate open floor with with an unreasonable intensity. It's probably half the reason we left Boston, I hated my house so much. Anyway, the layout pictured is odd.

[California]

It sounds like a nice house! It looks like there is a break along the wall between the fridge and the microwave/counter area. Is there a door to the garage there, or something else? The layout is a little funky with limited counter space. A movable island would fix the counter space issue, as PP suggested.

How much do you entertain? Could you entertain in the backyard? If it's mostly your family of four, the kitchen set up looks fine. For us, we mostly use our kitchen table as additional counter space when we're making meals. My kitchen has an L shape too and I miss the triangle layout we had at our last house. I find I naturally am drawn to use the kitchen table for food prep- it helps with the flow between fridge/sink/stove. For my family of five we use our big table in our dining area every day.