Dining Room Seating- Check!

Confession: After buying our fabulous new dining table in May, we moved the old dining set into the living room, with every intention of putting it up for sale immediately. We sold the set on craigslist in November.

Even I'm giving us the side eye glance for waiting so long on that one.

However, that means we did finally settle on seating for the new table. It was a really long process where we sat in countless chairs at so many different stores, brought home four options (that ultimately got returned), did hours of online browsing and had at least 3 blog posts ( here, here , and here ) devoted to the dining room alone. What can I say? I either make extremely fast snap decisions based on emotion or I like to beat an idea to death with thorough research and pro/con lists.

Our search ultimately ended with me sitting in a Home Goods chair looking extremely dejected and frustrated. Taking a thoughtful sip from my Starbucks, I looked up at Pete and went "Lets go with the couch and the stools. We both really like them and I'm tired of dealing with this crap."

Couch and stools. Um Eva, you're missing the "chair" part...

I'll backtrack to the start. It all started with this picture that I found floating around the blogosphere last year that eventually got sourced back to SouthernLiving.com. Everything about the picture looks so inviting to me. I loved the smaller in stature wood and metal table paired with the upholstered loveseat. Everything about this set up makes me want to plop down and have a cozy dinner at the table with Pete, something we rarely do.

When we came home with our new table, this picture popped back into my mind. So while searching for chairs, I also expanded my search to include an armless love seat. Which is why when I came across this love seat on overstock, I was uber excited to show Pete an example of how we could interpret the look from the inspiration picture. The loveseat was pricey at $300, but I figured if we ever tired of it at the table that I could easily find another place in the house for it.

Since we need seating for more than two people at the table we grabbed the another idea of using stools in place of chairs. That would open up and be a good balance to the bigger love seat.

The stools would be the CB2 Contact Stools I wrote about way back half a year ago. Pete loves them and now that we have then, I'm a fan myself. With their small size and simple look I thought the stools could pull furniture double duty by being movable seating and act as side tables if the need arose.

They are a great as seating option for kids because they are super solid, spin in circles and can be wiped down. A few days after ordering the stools showed up on our front porch. We almost had an "oh no" moment after placing them at the table, because they came close to not fitting. Thank goodness that even despite not measuring the height of the table they did end up working just fine. You think we would have learned that by now, but always freaking measure!

Which is how we ended up with this:

Next instalment: I'll tell the story of how we did eventually end up with two chairs. The search restarted with a comment from my friend who mentioned that she'd cut someone in order to snag a spot at love seat at our next girls night....