Raw City Home Lounge

Dear Dan & Maitae,

Thanksgiving is looming and I’ve got  in-laws, friends, friends of friends, family members, pets, and even an old college professor coming over for dinner, and we have no dining table (unless you countmy husband’s old bachelor pad card table with a crooked leg.) The table we love is a Mahogany dining table, but it’s an 8 week wait, or we can buy one we don’t love right off the floor.  Help!

Signed: Run out of of time

Dear Run:

Maite’:Which is gonna last longer, the marriage or a good dining table?  Seriously, I think we both know the answer.  Tell everyone
that you have the flu and send them to Whole Foods for a little
precooked Tofurky goodness, and go buy the table of your dreams.

Love the Tofurky

Good design trumps true love any day of the week, in my book.

Daniel: Slow down there, Scrooge.  I agree that you shouldn’t buy a dining table under duress; in a year, you’ll be glad you waited.  But you can still have a fabulous dinner.  Put a couple six foot folding tables together (40 bucks or so from Home Depot) and go buy a couple yards of way over-the-top fabric for a table cloth.  No one will even notice that they’re eating on Masonite and tubular steel.

Maite’: Actually, that’s MY old trick that Daniel just stole, AS
USUAL!!  You can get a really cool piece of fabric downtown (you’d need 5 yards or so) for about 3 bucks a yard.

Velvets, satins, tapestry chenilles, whatever, you’re just gonna throw it away afterwards; which means you can laugh in the face of spilled red wine and the cranberry sauce you threw at your husband when he told that one joke of his.

Daniel: For a very organic and Autumnal  touch, get some of those mini pumpkin squash things, cut a slit in them lengthwise, and use them to hold up place cards. Printing them on parchment paper gets you extrapoints.  Throw some red and brown fall leaves on top of the tablecloth, on the plates.

Maite: String some English Ivy through your wrought iron chandelier  for an original, organic touch.

Daniel: Then just laugh and laugh when your cousin’s  obnoxious baby spews applesauce all over everything…

Yuck.

So let’s get to it.  I like big dining tables.  Really big, like, ginormous big. The dining table is the heart of the home, I think, and the bigger, the better. I like to sit at a giant dining table at night and slump over my supper so I can pretend that I have a rich and pretentious family that prefers not to dine with me because of my clearly immoral ethical standards.  Even in a small house, a giant dining table is inviting and friendly and will generally end up being the central hub of all the activity.

As a kid, we had this humongoid drop leaf table that only fit in our tiny dining room after my father knocked down the wall between the house proper and the garage.  I remember doing homework at that table, dying Easter eggs, drawing, making Lego spaceships, reading the paper and, later, going online.  I remember my mother rolling out bedsheet sized hunks of dough that she would turn into a dozen pies.  I remember eating every holiday meal for a thousand years at that table, as well as lunches, and even the modern breakfast (five minutes of coffee and pop tarts and some veggie bacon or cold pizza, if you were lucky.)  I also remember a dozen discussions, arguments, knock-down drag-outs, jokes, stories, plans, meetings, and even a few bring-the-girl-home-to-meet-the-family type affairs.

There is a nick in the top of that table, I mean there are a thousand nicks, let’s be honest; but there is one in particular that I run my finger over every time I visit my folks.  It’s the dent that was left when I accidentally smashed the lighting fixture above and it clunked down into the oak planks and left a little divot.  I am firmly of the opinion that, because of that little dent, that table is worth, oh, four, maybe five million dollars.

So get a big table, kid, seriously.  Get a big one that can take a little abuse from a falling lighting fixture and more than a few thrown mashed potatoes and even a handfull of tears and angry oaths. ‘Cause that’s where the heart is, right there where the wall used to be.

Daniel