Outfitting the Dining Room

In our new house, we have made a commitment to actually sitting at the dining room table to eat our dinner. Imagine that! In our current house, our kitchen is large and has a work island with a couple of stools. The dining room is a few steps away through a past the basement stairs and thru a doorway. Lately, we've fallen into the routine of standing around the kitchen island to eat. It's a bad habit and one that we want to change.

We hope that the openness in our new house between the kitchen and dining space will encourage sitting down to eat meals. This is a good goal. As a part of this new plan, we've decided on a new dining room table. We saw this great table (Cross Extension Table by Matthew Hilton) at Design Within Reach a few weeks back and were impressed with it's proportions (it's narrow at 35.5", which I like) and extends to 116". The extension leaves store right under the table.

It's available in a wenge finish or oak. Although the dark wenge would go with the wood in our kitchen, we decided on ordering the oak finish, partially based on recommendations from our good friend Fiona and hoping that the light wood finish will make the space appear larger than the dark finish. Now, we just have to wait the 12-16 weeks for it to arrive!


For chairs, we decided on this Room and Board version of the Arne Jacobsen classic Series 7 chair. For $79, it's a good deal and it's such a classic, that we can always order more later. It's a stackable chair and easy to clean (great for kids). We're going with the white finish.

So, that's it for our new furniture budget.