We’d been using our dining room table since 2016. It’s been with us in three states and through four moves. It’s served us so well, and was the perfect dining room table to have through all our apartments and condos and rental homes. But man, it was time for an upgrade.

The Before

I was working with an interesting area in our house. We don’t have a formal dining room, so this is where everyone eats and hangs out. You can see in the photos that it actually makes a lot of sense to have a four person table in this kitchen/dining room. It’s even how the house was staged when we bought it. But we love having friends over for dinner and hosting family in town. And our old dining table (shown above) was just not cutting it anymore.

The Solution

My dream was to get a round dining table. I’ve always wanted one, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it since it’s not a big enough room to have a large circular table to fit everyone around. But it also couldn’t be a long table because then you’d be bumping up into the flow of how people walk through the dining room and kitchen. I ended up finding an extending round dining room table! The table extends into an oval. So when we want people over, we can put one or two leaves in and make it longer and oval. It’ll feel a little tight walking through when it’s extended, but this way everyone has a place to sit at the table – an issue we were running into with our last table. We’d have to feed all the kids, then release them to the playroom so that the adults could eat dinner and have a place to sit. Not ideal and sort of awkward.

Not Afraid Of White!

Yes the chairs have cream colored fabric and no it doesn’t scare me with kids! We have our kids in their Stokke chairs, and when friends with kiddos come over, we’ll have folding chairs for the kids. Just to be on the safe side, I am going to spray them with this solution to help when there are inevitable spills. For a while I used to run away from white because of kids. Then I realized for a lot of things (both furniture and clothing) what worked and what I liked was white and I just needed to embrace the kids’ mess and if there was going to be a stain it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Our kids are good about only sitting in their chairs and know that the other chairs are for grown ups.

Links

Dining room chairs and table are both from Arhaus. I love their products and it was a great experience buying from them.