{Furniture choices} dining table

Now that the new ground floor space is coming together, it’s time to start making exciting choices about furniture, decoration and accessories (my favourite bit). Until the wall between the kitchen and dining room was knocked down, Ben and I really struggled to picture the new layout, and what furniture would work well in it. It’s a good thing we didn’t rush into buying a new kitchen table, because we changed our minds at least three times.

We started off thinking we’d like to buy a old traditional pine table cheap on eBay, and then paint it a bright colour. But we’ve already bought a beautiful old dresser from eBay, and are thinking about painting that, so we thought that might be bright-paint-overkill.

Then I spotted this beauty on Made.com (a fantastic interiors site if you’ve never heard of it before), and I fell in love with it. I’ve always dreamed of having the Super-Elliptical dining table by Fritz Hansen, but it’s way over our budget, but this one from Made.com had the same sort of feel without the designer price-tag.

It’s lucky my usual impatience didn’t win out and I didn’t buy it there and then. We thought it would be a good idea to cut out a cardboard template the size of the table and check it for size in the kitchen. To make it even more realistic we balanced the cardboard on two chairs so that it was at table height. And it was far too big. It would have totally blocked the natural flow through the rooms. There’s no way the twins could have indulged in their favourite sport of careering round the space on their ride-ons.

So it was back to the drawing board. In the end we decided a small square table would be perfect for everyday use. We created another template and lived with this in the space for a couple of days and it worked nicely. But we do also want to entertain, so we agreed that an extending table would be perfect. We were about to order one from the high street but a six-week wait for delivery put us off (did I mention we are both ridiculously impatient?), and then after googling, ‘gloss white extending table’, I came across one from Danetti that extends from 120cm to a whopping 240cm. This means we won’t have to buy an extra folding table that we’d planned to keep in the garage and get out when we have a lot of people over for special occasions.

We ordered it last night. And it will arrive next week. Perfect for impatient people like us.