Dining Room Decorating Inspiration - Where is it?!

Our dining room is giving me the "blahs".  Basically, the same since we moved back into our house 8 years ago with exception of a new-to-us chandelier (my mom's used furniture store find), and some slight furniture rearrangement since the room grew by 2 feet over the course of the renovation.  My dad reupholstered the dining room chair seats for me before the famed house tour.  And, I recently reorganized the glass-fronted china cabinet (read about that here), but the dining room seemed otherwise lackluster.

I think the main problem is the lack of a rug - the room feels cold without it.  We never had a rug in this room pre-renovation because this was our main eating area.  With kids, a nice rug is really not an option in an eating area.  Also, the botanical prints are pretty but not particularly interesting.  So, I'll start a search for some replacement possibilities over the next few weeks. 

In the meantime, I did some browsing online for inspirational dining rooms and I was surprised to find so little.  Do people just not care about dining rooms enough to post about them?  I even checked Martha Stewart and dining rooms are not even an option on the list.  Same goes for BHG (my other go-to).  Finally, I skipped over to HGTV and found some dining room inspiration there. 

After looking through a bunch of pictures, I was surprised that there are relatively few stand-alone dining rooms pictured - many are now part of the kitchen or great room.  I like this idea generally because I think it makes a tons of sense in most houses.  We rarely use our dining room but I still feel like we need the space for a fairly large group (6+ people) to eat on occasion.  We keep our kitchen table small intentionally so that we do get more use out of our dining room.  But, after looking at pictures of about 300+ dining rooms, I'm stil not feeling very inspired.  Maybe a trip to HomeGoods will help!