Daily Chatter: 5/8/13

Did you notice anything about our dining room in the pictures of our house?  Like the fact that there is no table?  Yeah, so here’s the story: we used to have a granite-topped table that we got off Craigslist that worked great for years (it was fabulous for kneading bread if you are short like me!) but our family had gotten too big for it and obviously there are no leaves for a granite table.  So we sold it on Craigslist and have been using a folding table and metal conference room chairs for several months.  The chairs were less than ideal, but we loved the space of a six-foot long folding table!

But, when we put in the wood floors, we knew there was no way we were going to put the metal chairs on the floors – there’s not a way to pad them and they would almost definitely scratch the floor.  Plus, having a folding table in the dining room sort of took the look of the house from “maybe perhaps sophisticated” to, well, I don’t know but it definitely would have gone down a notch, which I could deal with on a daily basis but not when we are selling the house.

So, we have been sitting on the kitchen floor to eat meals for about three weeks now, and it’s been a whole bundle of fun, as you can imagine.  I cannot wait to get the house under contract so we can set up the folding table and buy some folding chairs!  Sometimes, we move the cocktail ottoman from the living room into the dining room and put a sheet on it and the kids use it as a table, which works pretty well.

We considered all sorts of options for buying, borrowing, or even renting a table and chairs, but ultimately we decided that we didn’t want to spend a few hundred dollars on something temporary that we really don’t have a use for, didn’t have the time to fix up one from Goodwill or Craigslist, and didn’t have the budget to buy a really big table like we ultimately want, so we are going without for now.  (When we move, we’ll set up the folding table again.)

We’ve sort of gotten used to it, and it’s not quite as bad as it was at first.  It’s actually kind of nice – I don’t think anyone eats as much, haha.  The worst part is trying to keep the baby out of everyone’s food (did I mention we got rid of the high chair a long time ago?), especially since she can’t have dairy and all of the other kids eat it.

If you looked at the pictures of the house, you probably had the same question as a lot of people: what is with the big check on your living room wall?!  It’s a blown-up, canvas version of a check that my great-grandma wrote for a pair of my dad’s shoes in 1957.  The check is from the dairy farm that my great-grandparents owned, the bank on the check is the one my grandma worked at for years, and my great-grandma’s signature reminds me so much of my dad’s own writing.  So, it’s a little (or big) piece of my paternal family history.  I know it’s totally weird but I love it so there. :)