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....

New Dining Room Table! (Or Crate and Barrel Outlet Score)

Something that we didn’t need, but wanted to replace was our dining room table. We bought the table about 6 years ago ( from the same place as our craptastic bedroom set) and it has remained in great shape because we pretty much never use it. Sure it holds a lot of mail and the occasional bouquet of flowers, but very rarely do we sit down and eat there. Even more rarely was using it to host people over for dinners. Although recently my table did hold a massive craft party that was a raging crafty success, fueled by lots of champagne.

We like, not love, our table. It was cute and fit with the sorta country vibe of the house. Most of all it was cheap but seemed to be built of decent quality. Even though for the first two years we had the legs put on wrong and therefore thought it was crappy. Guess that’s what happens when you don’t read the directions and don’t use your common sense. The day the light bulb went off and we realized the legs were on wrong there was much hysterical laughter in our house. As an FYI, they legs are on right in the picture above :)


This weekend we took a little trip up to the Crate & Barrel outlet to browse around. Our hope was to find a dresser for the bedroom, as there were a couple that were in production on the website that I really liked. Alas, you always find something that you aren’t looking for! We came across a table and both of us looked at the other said “I really like this”. We didn’t even need a table! We had one! And we have one coming to us from my Dad when he sells his house and moves out.

Yet, we really just loved this one table. The lines were chunky, strong and it was just a better fit for our style now. It was also a better quality of construction and materials than the table we have now. Plus, it was a sweet 50% off the retail price tag, making the table a very attractive amount of dollars for something we liked so much. The table, for those are would be interested, is the Pacifica 60" style at Crate and Barrel.

Whenever we like something at an outlet, we leave it alone and walk around the rest of the store. I don’t like to make snap decisions and need some time to make sure I’m not acting on the “OMG SALE, OMG OUTLET, OMG I HAVE TO BUY THIS NOW” feeling.

I tend to lose my mind when it comes to good buys, sometimes I need to reel myself in a little bit to make sure there are no buyers remorse feelings later on. We walked around the outlet. Look at other things and sat in the couches. I may have even lounged about in one relishing how comfortable it was.

And then I saw someone by the table looking at it.

That freaking yard sale instinct flared up in me and I think I said “ oh hell no” out loud.

That is when I knew. I really wanted the table.

Glancing over to Pete and I saw the same look. We did our non verbal communication thing and soon enough he snagged a salesperson to put the table on hold for us while we shopped around more. We got some really cool stuff, including new table linens, and made our way to the check out.

Taking off the back two legs and we were able to get the table loaded into our SUV and happily drove away with our new table feeling all excited about our new purchase. Once we got it home, we started to brainstorm about what type of chairs to get for the table. Nothing at the C&B outlet really worked well along with the table and neither did our old chairs. Besides we want to sell the old dining room table as a set on Craigslist.

I'll touch more on the chairs in another post. But here are some picture of the new table set up in its new home last night. We quickly put this together in order to take some photos. I've also realized that rug would be a great addition to the dining room, I think it would help to anchor the table.