Real Furniture

The fall before NYDD and I got married NYDD’s grandma moved to a nursing home so she could be taken care of.  Her children cleaned out her house to sell it and offered a few of the items to us.  They were all very 60′s looking but we were just glad to have furniture we didn’t have to purchase ourselves.  Over the years we’ve upgraded a few of the items and tossed others but the dining room table and chairs have held on strong.  They certainly aren’t beautiful, but the table is big by itself and has two more leaves to add length.  It has functioned as a kitchen table, a craft table, a study table, and a dinner prep table.  I get a little nervous with the leaves in.  The little spindly legs are out on all the corners and with the leaves in it it seems to bow a bit in the middle which makes me hesitate to put anything on it.  The chairs are a brown vinyl and, though they are not the prettiest things they are pretty comfortable.  Until lately.  They are almost 50 years old we’re guessing and have begun to fall apart.  Some are splitting at the seams and some are just splitting.  Duct tape isn’t really working and though we’ve discussed getting a new set over the years we haven’t considered it too seriously until the last few months when the splitting began.

We’ve browsed a little online, made trips to different furniture stores, and looked for deals at IKEA.  We’re trying to save money so we didn’t want to spend much on replacement chairs.  The last few days we’ve been checking craigslist and found a set we liked.  We called on it, went to take a look, and ended up buying the set for what we felt was a good deal.  The top needs to be refinished and we had to clean it a bit, but since it was used we were kind of expecting that.  We (and by “we” I mean NYDD and the husband of the family we bought the set from) loaded it into and onto the Subaru (really we’ve been surprised by what can fit in that thing).  It might have looked a little scary, but it was actually really tied down and we made it home without even a slip.  NYDD put it back together and we feel like we’ve moved up in the world.  It’s like we have real dining room furniture!

The table gets huge.  It has two leaves and can spread out to 114″ long.

I love the long lines of the chairs and NYDD likes the padded seats – a requirement in any new purchase for him.  They are currently covered in dark denim and some plastic as the family we bought them from had kids and wanted to protect the chairs.  We took off the plastic except for Peanut’s chair and like the way it looks.  I’ll change the covering when I find a fabric I really like, but in the mean time the denim works fine and looks okay.

Yay for happy craigslist finds!