Rec room; family room, living room, dinner room, study...keep one.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When reading a description of a largish house (and most US houses look excessively large to me) I have a hard time distinguishing what goes on respectively in the rec room, family room, living room, dinner room, study.

Let’s face it, 90 percent of what people do in their home, when they aren’t cleaning or doing chores, is sitting behind some computer, sitting in front of some screen, sit behind a table doing a hobby, or maybe, occasionally, sitting on the couch with visitors/friends.

So what is, for you, the purpose of these similar rooms? If you could keep the one you most used, which one would it be?

And the other rooms? Are they mostly used as the primary living room by other members of your household? Are they filled with stuff? Do you have them just to withdraw to if your spouse has company over? Do you have them because a normal person just has all these rooms?

2

I’ve never lived in a house with a rec room, altho I grew up in a house with a finished basement where we kids were consigned to play, so I suppose that might qualify. I’ve owned only one house with an eat-in kitchen, so the dining room had been a necessity. Our current house has a living room and what used to be called a den, but when we remodeled, we took out the wall between the kitchen and the den and made a kitchen/family room combo, and until we bought living room furniture, it was the main living space in the house. Now, however, we spend most of our time in the living room. But my computer and our wood stove live in the family room, so I can’t give that up… What a dilemma!!! :smiley:

The best arrangement we ever has was in one of the smallest houses we owned. It had a great room that had a kitchen area, a living room area, and a dining room area, but except for the tile in the kitchen and the carpet in the rest of the room, there was no clear delineation. I liked it best.

3

I currently live in one room. I’ve found my couch to be more comfortable than my bed, so in this room I have my PC, my TV, and my bed-which-is-actually-my-couch. I call it my living room, but I’m sure previous tenants had other names for it.

4

My parents house had most of these rooms, so I can tell you what they were used for in that case. This was a middle-class housing development in the exurbs, in the 70s-80s.

-Living room: more formal, had the fireplace, used to visit with guests. No TV

-Family room: had TV, more comfortable furniture (recliner), used for hanging out, watching TV

-Rec room: didn’t officially have one, but the basement was finished and basically was this. Used as a giant playroom when my siblings and I were kids, then later we had a pool table and such for hanging out. Was nice to have a place where the barbie doll house could sit out and take up a ton of room (bedrooms were small and just for sleep)

-dining room. Where the dining table was. Where we ate most every meal. The kitchen had a small table, but not big enough for the whole family (5 people) to eat together. The kitchen table might be used for snacks or if just two people were eating together

-study. In our case, this had the computer, all the files, and my parents both worked in there sometimes, when they weren’t at the office

-other than these, there were 4 bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small powder room (half-bath with toilet and sink, no bath or shower). Uses for these would be obvious :slight_smile:

My current house has a living room and a dining room, no table in the kitchen, and none of these other rooms (besides bed and bath of course!). I’m perfectly happy in a much smaller space.

5

You forgot sun room, conservatory, bonus room, den, breakfast nook, rumpus room, play room, parlor, exercise room, ball room, office, library, the list goes on and on. One celebrity even had a room for gift wrapping. I want one of those.

6

When I think of a study, I think of a fairly small room with bookcases and a desk (and anytime in the past 15 years, a computer). Probably too small for a bed, or more than 2-3 chairs.

A dining room (can’t say I’ve heard the term ‘dinner room’) is just that: a room with a dining table, where you sit down and eat meals together.

The living room - family room - rec room spectrum is basically from more adult-oriented/formal/neat to more kid-oriented/casual/messy.

7

The first house I lived in had a kitchen ad living room on the first floor. We ate in the kitchen, even when company came over. The living room was where we watched TV, I played with toys, where my mother ironed.

When I was 7 we moved to a house with a living room, dining room and kitchen. The living room was never used, it was for when company came over. We had a finished basement where we gathered to watch TV. When we kids were small we all ate in the kitchen, eventually we moved to the dining room as the kitchen wasn’t very big.
It wasn’t a formal dining room though, it was attached to the kitchen.
When company came over the adults ate in the dining room and the kids ate in the kitchen.

The basement room also had a bar and fridge for when my parents had parties. We also had a ‘pool’ room which was where the pool table was kept. It wasn’t finished though and any time a ball got knocked off the table somebody would have to fish it out of the sump pump. YUK!

Now the part of the basement that was the bar is a bedroom and the other half is a sitting room, and the pool room has become the junk storage room.

Our dining room was also where we did homework, played board games, sewed, did crafts, wrapped gifts and where my parents did their bills. etc.
Part of having all those separate rooms is being able to do one thing in a room without having to pick everything up to do something else. If you have a study with a desk you can keep all your bills and stuff in there. I hated when I was in the middle of sewing something and I’d have to stop in the middle and pick up everything and put it away so we could eat dinner. Then pull it all back out when dinner was over.
If you have a rec room you can have a TV, toys, exercise equipment, game tables and stuff in there. By having a family room or rec room your living room isn’t always cluttered up and stays presentable for guests.
If you have a rec room when you do have guests the kids can congregate there and leave the adults to the living room.
If you entertain a lot you may want a separate ‘formal’ dining room, which is a separate room from the kitchen, to serve dinner. As opposed to just a dining room (area) which is attached to the kitchen but not a separate room.
Dens, studies and offices are traditionally where the man of the house went to escape and do manly things.

I’ve seen newer houses that don’t have living rooms at all, or they are so small as to be worthless.

Family rooms are often attached to the kitchen so whoever is working in the kitchen can keep an eye on the kids and/or talk to their guests.

Not everybody uses the rooms the same way though. What was the formal never used dining room in my friends house was used as a bedroom in another friends house.
That is where lifestyle comes into play as to how the rooms are used.

People with more money tend to have single use rooms as opposed to multipurpose rooms.

When I lived alone my dining room was my sewing/craft room. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I ate a meal at the table. If I had been a family I’m sure it would have been used as a dining room.

If I had to pick just one, probably the living room, but if I was married with a whole mess of kids I’d want the family room attached to the kitchen.

8

In my parents’ house, the living room is where the gigantic couch and the gigantic TV are.

The den is where the piano is, along with a sofa and loveseat. Its primary purpose is to be a place for my dad to nap.

The dining room is tiled rather than carpeted and has a lot of natural light. It’s the dining room because it has a dinner table in it.

There’s a kind of reading nook thing that I believe used to be an extremely small dining room at one point - my mother has an overstuffed chair in it and uses it mainly for napping.

The dining room, den, reading nook, and kitchen all share contiguous floorspace, so none of them are actually dedicated “rooms.”

There’s a mudroom that leads out to the backyard, which has been repurposed into a cubicle-like office for my mother.

If it were my house I’d move the television to the den and use the much larger living room as a general entertaining space/library, but that’s me. I live in an apartment and don’t get to make cool decisions about what I would do with all of my various rooms.

9

Well the house my great grandfather built that we ended up with in 1949 when my parents married had a library, a dining room, a small front parlor [formal living room that got turned into a play room for my brother and I] living room with a morning room [small area that had been used for the sempstress to come do clothing fittings that my Mom used to grow herbs and houseplants] and the kitchen had a regular pantry, a butler’s pantry between the kitchen and dining room, a servants area that we turned into a breakfast nook and the back stairs down to the basement and up to the servants quarters. Upstairs had servants quarters [2 bedrooms, sitting room and bathroom] nursery [2 bedrooms, bathroom and bedroom for the governess] and 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, and a white goods closet with a chute down to the basement for laundry, and stairs up to the attics. Attic had a full bath, a full dressing area with 5 by 10 cedar closet and then a giant room that was the front half of the house that was my great grandfathers floor, he had an office set up in the big room, and he ‘dressed’ in the bathroom and closet. The rather huge walk in closet and bathroom with the master bedroom was for my great grandmother. The basement had a huge laundry room that had an exit to the servants yard for hanging laundry to dry, 2 coal rooms, a wood room, a central furnace room with what was originally a coal burning furnace for heat and hot water, a vermin proof room [lined with metal so rats couldn’t get in] a preserves room lined with shelves and having a 55 gallon vinegar barrel for making cider vinegar, and a couple storage rooms. Then there was a barn with space for 2 carriages and 3 regular stalls and a large loose box, tack room and a 2 car garage my dad added to the barn. There was a small brick building that was used to generate gas for the cook stove and to power a small generator. He had one of the earlier electrified houses in the area.

There were 2 other houses on the same t intersection, he had one built like his house for each of his 2 sons and his daughter, my great aunt Bessie lived with him and she inherited the house from him and lived in it until she sold it to my father.

10

Without them, Clue would be a very short, boring game.

11

The house I grew up in had two living rooms (living room and parlor), dining room, eat-in kitchen, family room, nursery (playroom), finish basement with rec room and workshop, 3 bedrooms and a maid’s bedroom on the 3rd floor with the playroom.

It had a 2 story carriage house and the house and yard took up 1/2 a city block. Let’s see - no TV in the living room, but we were comfortable hanging out there, reading, playing, whatever. Dining room for when we had big family dinners, kitchen otherwise. TV in family room. Books and games in the playroom. Mother made the basement rec room into an antique shop. With 7 people it was nice to have a house large enough you could hear yourself think.

StG

12

Don’t ask me. No matter where I live- big houses or small- I tend to spend 90% of my time in one room. I’ve had houses with rooms I didn’t enter for months and were nothing more than a pain to clean.

That said, I think it’s different when you have a large family, especially if you have a range of ages. It’s nice, for example, to have a room to exile the teenagers to.

13

Of those choices, I’ve only ever had living room and dining rooms—and the dining room was in the house I grew up in, which was built in the early 1900s. We kids only ever used those rooms on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but our parents used the living room. When we were allowed to play in the house, we played in our bedrooms or the adjacent hallway. There was no study or family room or rec room, and we ate our meals in the kitchen.

In subsequent houses I’ve only had a living room, which is basically whatever room the sofa and TV is in. Some people in the Midwest have both a living room and a family room; the living room is where you entertain the pastor or your book club, and the family room is where you and the kids (and their friends) hang out together.

Most of those other rooms (rec room, study/den) have these days been combined into the family room. Life is a lot more casual in the US than it was a few decades ago.

14

While I do spend most of my time [now] in the bedroom/office either on the desktop or in bed with a laptop on a hospital table, it is nice having a living room for visitors, and while yes one can eat in the kitchen, it is nice to have a dining room for holidays or guests. It is nice having a separate study/library so someone can have some quiet time for homework/reading/ working and a craft room so the sparklies don’t get embedded in your laundry or sprinkled into your yoghurt.

While my house currently is 800 square feet, I would have no problem justifying one of 2500 feet and all the rooms mentioned, and a spare bedroom for houseguests.

Of course, unless we were rich, I couldn’t really justify one of those 3 master suites, 4 bedroom 5 bathroom 5000 square feet places, or a second vacation house. Now if I was rich, I would probably have a summer cottage in Western NY or coastal Maine, and a rest of the year house in the Florida Keys [maybe on Cudjoe Key. The AF Blimp station appeals to me. :p]

15

The house we just bought is very like this, one large open space with a two-sided fireplace in the middle. It had been on the market for a year, possibly because most people are used to defined purpose rooms and were confused how this would be liveable. In the blueprints the back part of the room with all the windows and the view is supposed to be the living room, but I intend to use it as a dining room and put the living room furniture in the middle section next to the kitchen island. There is also a family room/TV room upstairs, which we are using instead as a very large office.

My choice is obviously a great room.