Harvest table

This was not expected.

Handy Dad and Sewing Mum showed up at the cottage on Sunday with a present: a harvest table and 6 chairs!

I had previously mentioned to them that I was thinking about building a new table for the kitchen, something a bit narrower (so we don't crowd the fridge when we're all seated) and a bit longer (so that we can fit more bums at the table at one time). I was toying with working on it this winter, in fact. Something like this.

Now what am I going to write about!?

Here's what the table looks like in the cottage as Mum and the kids get it all set up.

I'm not sure what to think about it yet.  They really caught me off guard!

Firstly, the dimensions are great: plenty of room for 6 to sit comfortably and we don't have to haul in the early-ugly chairs from the porch at each meal.

It's a little bit... I dunno. I'm having trouble finding the right words. It looks a bit on the home-made side, but I don't think that it is (there are stamps on the bottom sides of the chair seats, for instance) and "home made" among this crew looks pretty damned good so that's not really a good way to describe it. Maybe it's just that it's danged orange pine and I just finished painting the whole cottage to eliminate orange pine?

Also, the table top has big grooves. Big ones. Like if someone spilled a glass of milk we'd have little venetian canals of milk running around the table. So I will either need to find a way to fill in those grooves (varnish? bar epoxy? ALEX caulk and paint it?) or possibly remove it and build a new table top. A plastic table cloth is a ticky tacky option that I'd rather not have to explore, but might need to embrace in the short term to keep the grooves guck-free.

And then there are those other chairs that I so painstakingly re-covered last winter. With. All. Those. Staples. Am I going to just toss them?


*claps back of hand to forehead* Oh, woe is me!

Please don't get me wrong.  I am grateful. The table is lovely, sturdy, and very much the right proportions for the space. My parents are sweet, thoughtful, and above all generous to a fault. As with everything at the lodge, I think it's going to take some fine tuning to make it work, but it will work.

It just needs a bit more pondering.

I have a new table! Teehee!