Maybe I’m hearing about Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big House lately, or maybe Susanka’s book about living without wasted space is emerging in the collective cultural consciousness as a legitimate “thing.” Maybe all us Gen Xers are finally able to live in the houses we want because we have money. And we always hated the formal dining room – hated the dusty wallpaper, hated the stiff chairs, hated formal Sunday dinner, hated walking past that dark and serious room on our way out to play in the street.

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Whatever the reason, I’ve been noticing that the formal dining room is going the way of the dinosaur. HGTV’s “Bang for your Buck” recently featured a kitchen remodel on an M Streets home where the owners decided to pull their long dining table into their kitchen, eliminating a separated, dedicated dining room altogether. I recently interviewed a Lakewood family that did the same thing. Then yesterday I interviewed Mary Williams, an Oak Cliff resident that just moved into a remodeled 1920s cottage, where the builders had intentionally designed the room immediately off the kitchen – the room that would traditionally be the dining room – to be flexible. It could be used as a dining room or a family room, and the builders wired it for a TV on one wall. When I asked Williams what she intended to do with the room, she didn’t seem inclined to use it as dining room. She wasn’t fond of rooms that collect a lot of dust.

Here is where I admit to writing a blog post primarily to highlight a quote that cracked me up. Think of it as a post-script. I asked Williams if she was going to hang a TV on the wall that had been wired for such. She explained that she doesn’t really watch TV, and hasn’t for a very long time. She then said that when Nixon resigned, the TV went on the fritz. And since then she just never saw the need to invest a whole lot of time or money on television. There’s something delightful to me about a TV going out with the Nixon administration.

Maybe the dining room is going out with the Bush administration. I hope some cultural anthropologist in the future will make that far-fetched conclusion. That would be delightfully absurd.