Making Room at the Table

Back in March, after we refinished our floors, my husband and I slowly started making changes to our dining area—not all at once, and not by replacing everything. Most of the changes have been fairly small, but together they’ve made the room feel much more like us.

One of the bigger changes was our dining table.

The table we had been using was perfectly fine, but it was round and couldn’t expand to seat more people. Every time we had our family over, there was never quite enough room for everyone, and inevitably a few people would be left standing.

What we really needed was seating for at least eight.

Fortunately, We'd held on to my grandparents’ first dining table all these years. My dad quietly rescued it from their basement years ago and used it in our house in Maine.

It eventually made its way to my husband and me. We used the table for several years after we bought our first home. It was actually the first piece of furniture I ever refinished.

We didn’t exactly take the best care of it back then, though. If you look closely, you can still find little pools of dried glue, bits of sparkle, and paint spots here and there from when our kids were young.

And honestly, I kind of like that they're still there.

When we started thinking about the dining room, I realized the old table might be just what we needed. It was the right color for the room; it could comfortably seat six, and most importantly, we already had it.

We brought it in and then started shopping for chairs. We eventually found six regular dining chairs and two host chairs we loved, though we bought them without being entirely sure how we would fit all eight into our fairly small dining area.

There was a lot of moving, shifting, standing back, and moving things again.

Eventually, it came together.