A Place to Gather: Our Dining Room Story

425

Eclectic
HDB (Resale)
~1,100 sqft
3 br
Couple Living

Welcome back to bishanhomies - today we invite you to tour our dining room. We knew we would be hosting a lot, so we took extra care to design a welcoming and functional space. The warm wood tones and soft lighting create an inviting atmosphere for meals and conversations.
We know the pain of having to squeeze behind chairs to get in, out, or to navigate around a fully packed dining space, so we made sure to provision for enough walking space around the dining table. This was honestly a challenge - we had to strike a delicate balance between the size of the storeroom, dining space, and living space. After living in for almost 8 months, we've definitely made some micro adjustments along the way but our hard work during the reno period definitely paid off. We snagged a great deal for our dining set from Vintage Palace (Tan Boon Liat Building, #06-03). This dining set comes with a 1.8m table and 6 chairs, which is the perfect size for hosting our friends and family. When we host bigger groups of guests, we also have a foldable table that we set up. Our record was accommodating 17 guests around the table comfortably!
- #diningtable
(Mr.Homie really wanted me to include this picture to illustrate that there was ample space to walk around the dining table) ((That's him cosplaying as Flash in the background!!))
- #flash
Wooden dining chairs were non-negotiable for us, as we did not like the feeling of sitting on fabric / cushioned chairs in this weather. It was also a lot easier maintaining wooden chairs, since we could easily clean up any food stains or spills. Handles were also a must for maximum comfort - these chairs would sometimes double up as our mahjong chairs and being able to rest your arms mid game really helps to elevate the experience and relieve the tension. (Only the real ones would know) Fun fact: we have a total of 5 double sockets around the dining table! This came from a pet peeve I developed at my parents' place - I hated having to pull extension cables all over the place whenever we have steamboat, so we made sure to be extra excessive with planting sockets.
Our kitchen is a natural extension to our dining room. Although we cook pretty often, having an open kitchen has not been an issue for us as we are blessed with good airflow to help with dissipating smells. Given the diagonal wall in the kitchen (as shared in our house tour previously), we definitely needed this kitchen counter as an essential prep space. We chose a quartz countertop as we learnt that it was a super fuss free material in terms of maintenance, and it was highly durable as well. We've spilt our fair share of red wine and dark sauces since we've moved in, and it's been a breeze cleaning our mess up so far. This counter space has also become the buffet table set up on multiple occasions. We've had a few rounds of DIY Popiah parties with the counter as the assembly station, and other times the counter would be where guests could go to help themselves to the spread of dishes. It's definitely our favourite way of hosting, as all the dishes would be within everyone's reach!
- #openconcept
- #openkitchen
The kitchen is where Mr.Homie spends most of his time, which was surprising as cooking was never his passion before we moved in. Gotta hand it to him though, he's pretty good at cooking.
Apart from opening all windows and turning on the hood to full blast while cooking, we also rely heavily on our air purifier to eliminate smells quickly. We originally bought this air purifier to help eliminate the formeldehye around the house, but we also found that turning on the air purifier was also really effective at combating any cooking odours, even when we cook steak or fish! Under the counter, we've hidden another 2 double sockets. This has allowed us to be super effective whenever we cook, since we can run a minimum of 4 appliances at a time. Sounds excessive, but trust me, you'll thank yourself for building in more sockets when you want to concurrently run your stand mixer, steamer, toaster, and air purifier at the same time.
- #airpurifier
That's it for this week - thanks for following us around our dining room! It is truly such an important space for us and our guests, and we can't wait to create more memories with friends and family in this space.