new table

Our new dining room table is finally here! It was delivered this morning and it is awesome. We finally have a table big enough to look like it belongs in our huge dining room! We decided to put one of the leaves in for 'everyday' use - given that we have at least eight people over nearly every weekend, it seems practical and fills the room nicely. There's still another leaf, too, so it can get even bigger. Be still, my heart.


The top is hand-scraped wood, and has been roughed up artistically so that nobody will notice when we mess it up (a very necessary feature of furniture around here, let me tell you). By far the coolest part, though, is that the entire table is ringed by a sturdy steel band - it looks very solid and practical and industrial while still being beautiful. We love it!


Now on to arguing about chairs and getting rid of our old dining room furniture...

Note: the table is from local furniture institution Shofers, and I'm happy to recommend them - super smooth, from showroom to delivery. And they're on Twitter!

pocket doors redux

We've been working on these doors for months. They still aren't done. But, in a fit of realism, we decided that we needed to shift our priorities a bit. Finishing the antique doors we're retrofitting into pocket doors from the dining room into the office isn't the most urgent thing on our plate. Right now it's far more important that we get the stairwell banister refinished and rehung, so that the people who come to our house are safe and so that we can have overnight guests. So we elected to get the doors out of our work space (i.e. the guest room) and store them out of the way until we can get back to them to finally sand and paint them.

And where better to store them than in the 'pockets' they are intended for?


Yes, we hung the doors! Aren't they fantastic? They're really old, and really heavy, but we got hardware rated for doors even heavier, so it all works incredibly smoothly. Just imagine that the glass is clean and they're painted white!

father's day brunch

Last weekend we hosted a Father's Day brunch for Don's family (my dad, alas, lives in Seattle, which is a little far to travel for brunch). We had eight people total, adults and children, which was down some from the numbers we hosted on Mother's Day, which required an additional table to be set out.


All this entertaining is really emphasizing our need for more permanent dining room furniture. (The need to remodel the kitchen is already a given!)

dining room detail

I don't think I can possibly relate in coherent words the amount of marital discord caused by choosing a chandelier for the dining room.


PS - all of the arguing was totally Don's fault. And I still wish there were a few crystals.

dining room

The plan for this summer is to try to finish off the house one room at a time, one weekend at a time. We'll start our downstairs projects in the dining room: it needs crown molding, window trim, and the pocket doors into the office to be installed (this involves stripping and refinishing the cool old doors we found in the attic, which are what will be hung as pocket doors).


We also really need a new dining room table and chairs. Right now we've got our old table from our first house, which was a tiny townhouse. We've got both of its extender leaves in it and it's still dwarfed by the size of the room. The folding chairs don't help, either.



But at least it's a table - shown here with the pink and white Mother's Day flowers from brunch on it. The huge bay window, even without trim and finishing, is just as nice as I imagined it would be when they were installing it. We've had several family events as well as our gaming group in the new dining room, and it's great. Dinner parties to come! (Also, curtains.)