Dining Room Table Upgrade

 (From 3/10/16)

We've had our dining room table for years.  It's a pub-height table, which I have enjoyed, although that has caused some challenges for our kids climbing up to the chairs.  It's been fine over the years, but one problem has been the kids (mostly Joshua, or maybe all Joshua) causing the chairs to fall over backward.  That has caused several of them to break, although I have fixed some of them thanks to my very basic woodworking skills.  We bought a couple replacement chairs, but even with those we're down to five chairs.  With five in our family, that means we don't even have an extra chair for a guest.

Plus, as you can kind of see, the table surface is in pretty bad shape after years of abuse by three little kids (stabbing and dragging forks along the surface is something that has happened more than once) and just general wear and tear.  Since we decided to replace the carpet with hardwood in the dining room, we wanted to also get a bigger, nicer dining room table.  New dining room sets are very expensive, so we were trying to find one on Craigslist that was still nice but much more affordable than a new set.

We found one we liked, and last night was our last night with the old table (which was the first picture above), and tonight is our first night with the new table, which you see here.  It's nice because there are six chairs, and there is a leaf to extend it if needed.  The two chairs on the ends are covered chairs with a nice pattern, and the other four have the same fabric, but I covered them with a clear waterproof covering, as our kids plus fabric chairs aren't a good match.  But it'll be easy to remove the covers at a later date.  The surface of the table has a few scratches in it, so it's not perfect, but it's much better than what we had, so we're excited to have an upgrade.