New Dining Room Chairs

I've been waiting 23 years.

And I am not a particularly patient person.

I was thinking about that the other day when GoodMan and I finally ordered eight dining room chairs to go with the oak double-pedestal claw-foot table we purchased when we bought our house in 1989. When we bought that table we never considered we'd wait 23 years to purchase the chairs to go with it.

 Ours is a "Yours, Mine, and Ours" family, and in those days we were in the midst of the hectic, challenging, and expensive years of raising 5 teenage boys and one preschooler. We'd just been through an arduous move that required us to put our belongings into storage and first camping, and later staying at a run down hotel for all of the summer and into the early fall. The only thing that kept me going during those crazy days was knowing the home we were moving into was perfect for our big and busy family.

 The furniture from our old house was hand-me-downs and garage sale finds. Knowing we would have to pay to move the furniture three hours north, and then pay to store the furniture until we would take possession of our new house, we decided to give away almost everything. It didn't hurt that our old furniture was very worn and ugly and we felt flush with the cash from the sale of our old house. At the time it seemed we'd be able to furnish the new house easily with auction finds and of course watch for nice items at garage sales.

 Those long hot summer days at the campground, as we waited for our house to become available to us, provided ample opportunity for us to drive around and explore our new community. One day GoodMan and I took a more extended drive and happened upon an oak furniture "showroom" out in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. We both fell in love with the beautiful oak table taking up most of the outbuilding on a farm back in the woods. It was expensive, and we knew we couldn't afford to buy all of our furniture new, but we decided to splurge on one beautiful big showpiece.

  I don't remember talking about chairs that day, but we probably did. I know we didn't have the finances to even consider buying 8 matching chairs as well as all the other furniture and appliances we needed to purchase for the new house. A popular decorating style back then was a mix-or-match style. We determined we would buy oak chairs at auctions and garage sales one at a time and end up with a unique eclectic dining set. Well...it didn't work out as well as we hoped. It was hard to find oak chairs in good condition. The only time people wanted to get rid of a piece of oak furniture was when it was in need of major repair. When we did find one it was about as expensive as new. At the same time we had 8 people in need of chairs to sit at the table for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

 About this time my parents were downsizing their home for a move of their own. They offered us four ladder-back pine chairs with rush seats. The chairs had seen a lot of wear and tear, and they were not at all what we were hoping for, but they would work as we searched for the "perfect" chairs for our eclectic dining set. We bought other chairs in various stages of disrepair and tried to keep our family seated around the beautiful table. Over the years a combination of hand-me-downs, garage sales and even a foray into Craigslist kept chairs around the table, but we never achieved the eclectic oak dining set we were hoping for.  

 We considered buying new chairs every once in a while, but something else always seemed more important. In the early years it was growing boys in need of jeans and tennis shoes, then it was varsity jackets, graduation pictures, and class rings. As the years passed it became vacations, mission trips, weddings, and grandchildren.

 As I looked back on the 23 years we've waited for dining chairs, at first I wondered why we waited so long for something so basic. But in reality we had the basics covered all the time. Don't get me wrong. We plan to enjoy the new chairs. GoodMan and I will enjoy them as we eat dinner together and share the highlights of our days, and we'll enjoy them when our sons and their wives play card games late into the night during holiday sleepovers, and we'll enjoy them as our grandchildren gather around the table to color Easter eggs, carve pumpkins, or decorate Christmas cookies.

 And I will remember the chairs are not what really matters to me 

~ I've proven that for 23 years!

 

(I do have to admit though,

I am looking forward to 

matching chairs!)

6 weeks until chair delivery day...