Table Woes Ended

I am lounging by a fire, eating the last of my Christmas Chocolate Toffee Bites from Moonstruck Chocolate Co. (thanks, Chip and Jennifer!! They were fabulous!), drinking wine, and keeping M. company while the Packers kick the Vikings' collective hiney. It's a nice Saturday night.

It was also a pretty awesome day because... I got a new dining room table!! Yay for me! Some of my long-time readers may remember that more than a year ago, M. and I held a yard sale and sold off a bunch of house-cluttering objects, including our dining room table set (not cluttering objects, per se, but old, not the right look for us, and woefully small for our expanded family). At that point, we were left without a dining room table entirely, and we were reduced to eating all meals at the kids' small table. Shortly thereafter, I ordered a dining set (table and 4 chairs), a server (for my wedding china!), and two additional matching chairs from Target. After a couple of weeks, we saw relief from cramped dinners in sight when we came home to several large boxes deposited on our walkway.

UNFORTUNATELY, after lots of heavy lifting (and what M. swears is the start of all his recent back problems) and assembly, we discovered that the table was actually broken. The kind of broken that cannot be fixed or overlooked (aka a crack through the entire middle panel of the table). I spent about an hour on the phone with Target, FINALLY arranged for someone to come pick the table and 4 chairs up (since they were sold as a set), cried a little, and went to bed. In the morning, we dragged out the old, spare dining table we had hanging around (only possible because it was drop-leaf and folded down to a furniture item that was only 6-inches wide and could be placed against any wall) and put it to use. I'm so glad we had it, but it was a) rickety, b) waterstained, c) not an extension table (what we wanted), and d) rickety. Did I mention it was rickety? We kept the two extra dining chairs from Target (upholstered), and bought 4 dark wood chairs (cheaper and more kid friendly) to use with our back-up table. This post has some photos of our original dining room table, the "extra/spare" table we ended up using, and the server from the Target set that we kept.

Since then, we have faithfully used tablecloths (to cover the watermark) and accompanied every meal with hushed yells to the kids to "Stop jiggling the table! I mean it!" We've also suffered through lots of spilled drinks, and the awkwardness of trying to fit two more people at the table when we (oh so rarely) have guests.

BUT NO LONGER. Salvation has come, in the form of the World Market Mahogany Verona Trestle Table. My parents actually gifted us with a rather sizable Target gift card to encourage us to buy a new dining room table (perhaps because they are pretty much our only guests, and are usually the people we are awkwardly trying to fit around the table with us). Gun shy about ordering another table to be delivered to the house, and not able to find anything remotely close to the kind of table we wanted at Target, I stumbled on this table at the World Market after spotting a Pinterest link for a coffee table. People, if you're not on Pinterest, you should be. It's a wealth of serendipitious links and good ideas (though you do need to be able to spot them/sift through to find them). Anywho, found the table, which was on sale, and also had 126 customer reviews that were all unanimously positive. Said table was on backorder, but I (as the old commercial used to say) "let my fingers do the walking" and called around to some local stores to see if any of them had it in stock. As luck would have it, the Chevy Chase store did, and M. and I caravanned it down with the kids to pick it up today (saving us $100 in shipping costs to boot).

Now it is here, and set up, and I am in love. So is M. Is it wrong to love a table? Probably, but I do. It matches perfectly with our cheap Target wood chairs, and the beautiful Target server (that matched our original ordered-but-broken Target table). It is BIG (to us), fitting at least 8 when the extension is in place. And it is sturdy - I predict NO WOBBLES in our future. Maybe less spilled milk (but eh, maybe not. Kids are messy). And best of all, we still have that wonderful Target gift card from my parents to buy lots of wonderful Target things, like new (BIGGER!) tablecloths, and clothes!

Here is the table, tell me you love it:

Now we just have to get someone to take the old "spare" table off our hands...