Please Have a Seat in the Parlor

I grew up in a house with a stand-alone dining room. It had a fancy-like dark brown wooden table, large straightback chairs with cushioned seating that kids weren't allowed to sit on, a large bay window overlooking the front yard, a fancy-like chandelier and I think even lights that dimmed. I think we ate there 5 times. I'm pretty sure I dusted that table about 5,000 times. That room got more use as the place where guests would throw their coats than it did as a place my family used to entertain. We were definitely more fancy-like than fancy.

So I never had interest in a formal dining room. When we bought a house a couple years back that had one of those generic throw-away front rooms, set just off the kitchen and overlooking the front yard, we had no idea what to do with that space. But we knew it wouldn't be a dining room.

One of the fun indulgent things about moving into a larger house from a small house is you suddenly have space to buy things that you couldn't even contemplate when your kid's closet doubled as your closet … like a piano for my daughter … like a 60s-style record player cabinet for my envisioned vinyl collection … like some random-ass 70s-style orange velvet chairs. We didn't plan to turn the front room into a music and game space, but it has become one of our favorite places in the house. It has become the Parlor.

The Parlor features my daughter's piano (Facebook marketplace for $100, +$300 for the piano movers, +$300 for the piano tuning), the GE Porta Fi Console cabinet (Facebook marketplace for $150), the Fuse Audio Gold record player, the CoolGeek CD Player, about half of my vinyl collection (primarily Facebook marketplace), velvet orange swivel chairs (Facebook marketplace for $50 each), a small wooden table (Facebook marketplace for $20) that I sanded, stained and painted using a chess board stencil from Amazon ($10), and wall art game boards for cribbage, dice and scrabble (various Etsy sellers). The rug and vinyl record coasters came from Amazon, as did the record storage cabinets and wall display shelves.

Yes, we are now those people in the neighborhood always sitting in the front window watching every car that goes by, every walker or jogger that ventures past our house, every package that gets delivered. We are officially the unofficial neighborhood watch. But it's a pretty cool place to watch the world go by, play some games and listen to some music, and it's already seen more use in two years than the dining room I grew up with did in a decade.