The Dining Room

I don't really have a lot to say about the dining room. It was another one of those unnecessary rooms and really was just another place to pile stuff.  Mostly it was home to pictures. Mom took pictures of everything we did and we were involved in so many activities...dance, baseball, soccer, 4-H, scouts, etc. On top of that we tagged along with mom to meetings for PTA and Jaycees and a whole array of other organizations. In some ways it kept us busy and occupied outside the house, but on the flip side it gave us opportunity after opportunity to put on a good face and act like everything was okay. Either way, the dining room table - a wedding gift to my parents from my Grandpa - was buried under piles of photos and film canisters. A typewriter also sat on the back corner of the table, but for there was never a reason for us kids to go back in that corner of the room, so it somehow became scary to me. It wasn't until we went through the house in October 2013 that I realized it was the only corner of the house where you could see the carpet.

Photo @ Geoff Johnson

During that visit we also discovered a whole collection of tea cups that my dad's grandmother had passed down to my mom. They were stored in the china cabinet and with the exception of a little dust, they were in perfect condition. There were very few valuable or sentimental things that were salvageable from the house, but these are some of them and I'm so happy to have them and be able to pass them on to my kids one day.

Back when we lived there and the roof started leaking, the dining room had tubs and containers to try to catch the water and garbage bags to cover the things nearby. At one point the inner layer of the back sliding glass door shattered and a pile of glass remained along the door track until we cleaned the house last year. The dining room was also the place that I accidentally spilled my jar of mealworms that I had from an elementary class project. Because of the layers of surrounding mess, the spill was nearly impossible to clean up entirely and the crawly creatures seemed to thrive in the house. For years I would spot little mealworms here and there and every time I did I had such a sense of guilt. One innocent childhood mistake that should not have been a big deal but it haunted me for years.

Overall, with the exception of going in and out the back door, the only other memory I have in the dining room was shaving my legs for the first time with an electric razor. Random, I know, but I'm sure it had something to do with the state of the bathroom, which I'll post about next...

Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Bathroom here. 
Read about Geoff's Room here. 
Read about My Bedroom here.