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blinkerWe hosted some birthday festivities for Alek on Saturday night. It was nice to have people over, and to have an excuse to bake (not that we really need an excuse), but afterwards I started thinking about the social limitations of my living room. I'd like to start entertaining more often, but there are things about the space that I find slightly frustrating.
We've got two ugly couches that seat 5 people in an L-shaped configuration in front of the TV. The couch-less wall is mostly a doorway that opens into the front door area. The couches fill about half the space in our living/dining room and the other half is occupied by a table and four chairs. It's a nice room and it works well for entertaining 2-3 guests. Any more than that and we start running into seating issues. Sometimes people sit or stretch out on the floor, sometimes we move a few chairs opposite the couches, and it mostly works out.
The thing that frustrates me is that it's very hard to make good space for multiple conversations and I generally prefer parties that aren't limited to one conversation space with everyone sitting around talking together. When people are moving around, there are more opportunities to talk with different people and to have conversations that you don't necessarily want to share with the whole party. It's also easier to make a graceful exit if you need a break.
Two years ago, we had a lot of people over for New Years and I think that we did okay with space that time. We moved the dining table over to the side of the room to make more space for standing around. And we were doing lots more cooking, so folks were in and out of the kitchen all the time.
And now that I've gotten rid of most of the junk in my room, I think we could turn it into extra social space. We could probably also make some use of the screened-in porches in good weather. They're just too narrow for any furniture other than chairs (although we did once squeeze the dining room table onto the front porch so that we could have dinner outside because the weather was so nice).
We've got two ugly couches that seat 5 people in an L-shaped configuration in front of the TV. The couch-less wall is mostly a doorway that opens into the front door area. The couches fill about half the space in our living/dining room and the other half is occupied by a table and four chairs. It's a nice room and it works well for entertaining 2-3 guests. Any more than that and we start running into seating issues. Sometimes people sit or stretch out on the floor, sometimes we move a few chairs opposite the couches, and it mostly works out.
The thing that frustrates me is that it's very hard to make good space for multiple conversations and I generally prefer parties that aren't limited to one conversation space with everyone sitting around talking together. When people are moving around, there are more opportunities to talk with different people and to have conversations that you don't necessarily want to share with the whole party. It's also easier to make a graceful exit if you need a break.
Two years ago, we had a lot of people over for New Years and I think that we did okay with space that time. We moved the dining table over to the side of the room to make more space for standing around. And we were doing lots more cooking, so folks were in and out of the kitchen all the time.
And now that I've gotten rid of most of the junk in my room, I think we could turn it into extra social space. We could probably also make some use of the screened-in porches in good weather. They're just too narrow for any furniture other than chairs (although we did once squeeze the dining room table onto the front porch so that we could have dinner outside because the weather was so nice).
