When we first moved to NJ, we din't buy very much furniture, but we did have to buy a few big ticket items that we didn't have in NYC. We bought a couch, bc we only had a love seat in Brooklyn, bc that's what the space could afford. We kept the love seat (it has a pull out bed that's actually pretty comfy). We bought a queen bed; With more space we decided to luxuriate a little bit! We bought a vintage desk, vintage display case, and vintage floor lamp. That's it.
To me that seemed like a lot, but when I looked around our home, it was pretty sparsely furnished.
The one item that we still really wanted in our home was a dining room table. With everything we bought, it was hard to find furniture we liked, fit our budget, and we felt good about buying. We buy second hand. For a table we had very specific concerns. We are hard on surfaces. We draw, sew, mold, cook, eat, sort shells, pet cats, cut fabric, write letters, repot plants, etc... and we needed a table that could hold up to everything we throw at it, but also looked nice.
Or at least, looked nice until we inevantably destroyed it.
Needless to say we lived with no table for a long time, almost two years. Until one day, my father called to say that he thought he had found us one! A little while later, he drove up with the perfect, mid-century modern table sticking out the back of his car! He had found it out for trash day in the retirement village that his mother lives in. A little worn, a little wobbly, a little dusty, we brought it in and it was perfect.
Now two years after that, we’ve accumulated a lot more furniture, but we still love our dining room table. We do all the activities and projects we thought we would do, plus more, every day. We’ve had 6 cats use the table and now a roommate, too. We’ve hosted few dinners, but a very few. It’s usually a mess, often mid project, but we have started eating dinner at it each night again, and it’s a wonderful thing.
