After months of obsessing...

...I finally ordered a dining room table and chairs! As a reminder, this has been the pitiful state of our dining room for an embarrassingly long period of time...

Actually, it's even worse now - we moved the too-small table out to the porch, and replaced it with an old door on two sawhorses. Avec doorknob and hinges, for extra classiness. Wish I were kidding.

I've always pictured a big, rustic-but-not-too-log-cabin-ish farmhouse table, with a bench on the side closest to the kitchen, and Parsons chairs on the side closest to the window and the ends. We even had a little road trip adventure to look at some options. Well, things got really strange the other day when I was doing yet another Google search to see if I could find the table of my dreams... and I came across this picture on a website listing.

It's perfect! It's stunning! It's... strangely familiar?? That's because it turns out it was, literally, the second thing I ever pinned on Pinterest. And here it was, for sale!! Of course I emailed right away, and this beauty should be arriving in 2-4 weeks. In an even stranger coincidence, the seller was actually in South Carolina - but has family right outside Detroit, and so they're bringing the table when they visit (!).

So that left the question of chairs. I had been considering these Parsons chairs with a fun, bold floral pattern.

But the more I thought about it, the more I questioned whether these would work. First of all, I worried that the pattern might just be too busy. I was also nervous about ordering them online, since the colors might be different in real life - and in fact, many of the reviews hinted that the light color was closer to cream/khaki, which I didn't think would work as well. I was also worried about the brown clashing with all the other browns we have going on (beams, counter, table)... so I was really iffy on these, and decided to consider solid color instead. So the obvious choice would seem to be brown, but again, see issues with brown above. Hmmmmmm. After much thought (and squinting at the dining room), I decided the safest and most complementary choice would actually be a pretty bold one... red!

Yep, red leather Parsons chairs - am I crazy?? I think these are gorgeous, and I'm hoping they'll work with the brown table and our paint colors (the color in the background of the picture above is actually pretty similar to our dining room color). Plus they had terrific reviews on Overstock (4.9 out of 5.0 with 75 reviews!). As an added bonus, they were even less expensive than the patterned ones!

As an aside, some people who know me may be surprised that my vegetarian self bought leather chairs. Here was my reasoning. More and more, the arguments I find most compelling for my own vegetarianism have to do with the efficiency of using resources - and much of the time, leather is a byproduct of the meat industry. I also think these will hold up forever, so they'll be efficient in that they won't end up in a landfill a few years down the road. Finally, I try whenever possible to use natural (ideally local) products - I've always tried to do this, but definitely with big purchases I am making an effort to avoid plastic and other synthetic, petroleum-based materials. These things are all playing into my definition of "green" and how it fits into my life and decision-making right now. So all that rambling is to say: here's to many years of locally (backyard!) grown meals at the new dining room table!

Road trips and dining room tables

What, those two things don't automatically go together in your mind? Just us? Haha.

I gave a talk yesterday morning at a conference way up north. (Being in Michigan, I have a state-mandated requirement to illustrate this by showing you my hand and pointing to my middle finger middle knuckle.) Brandon came along, and since we were kinda close to Traverse City (pinky fingernail... "close" was relative), we thought we'd head over there to check out dining room tables at Woodland Creek Furniture. I mentioned them in a previous post about our ongoing quest to be real grown-ups with dining room furniture. Specifically, I'd seen this barn wood farmhouse table that I was dying to check out in person.

(Photo from Woodland Creek Furniture)

Well we did check it out, and unfortunately I have to say... I wasn't in love. In person it is MUCH more rustic than it looks here - which maybe I should have guessed from the rest of the Woodland Creek website (seriously, check it out). They have very neat stuff, but it's much more log-cabin than our style, which definitely blends rustic with some more contemporary elements. I just wasn't sure that it would work with some of the other things we have going on in the space. </pretendingtobeaninteriordesigner>

Anyway, happily,Woodland Creek has an associated company/showroom for us non-log-cabin-dwellers. Hooray! It is called Ur Houzz and it was full of many things I wanted to buy. There were two potential tables, and I should have taken photos because I can't find a good representative photo on their site. The first one was another farmhouse style, made from reclaimed wood, and painted with a distressed finish (in whatever color you want!). This is the top, but I'd just get simple square legs instead of the trellis style:

(Photo from Ur Houzz)

Actually now that I look at that again, it may not really be the same at all - because I think the ones we saw had much wider planks on top. Blog fail! Anyway, this of course set my head to spinning about colors... I hadn't even considered a painted table as a possibility, but these were really beautiful. I'm pretty sure I woke up out of a dead sleep on the way home, snapped my head around to look all bug-eyed at Brandon (who was driving), and said "OMIGOD THE TABLE COULD BE PLUM." To Brandon's credit, he kept driving and didn't look at me like I was a psychopath.

The other possibility - which has been floating around in our heads since the beginning - would be a slab table. I just think these are ridiculously gorgeous. My main concern is that we already have so many different types of wood going on, with the floor, beams, counter... would it be too much? Oh also they are like a million dollars.

(Photo from Ur Houzz)

But seriously.

And just to add to the confusion, here is one additional possibility that my BFF Craig found for me on his list. This is an unfinished farmhouse table made by Amish Chic Furniture (I know, awesome).

(From the Amish Chic Furniture Photobucket site)

This particular one is sold, but they can build another one in a couple weeks and finish it however we'd want - and it is significantly less $$$ than any of the other options. In a sad little twist, their warehouse is about two and a half hours away from here in a town we drove through yesterday. But of course we didn't know that at the time. Sigh.

Here are a couple more photos of their tables that other people have bought - a natural finish, and a darker stain.

(Both photos from the Amish Chic Furniture Photobucket site.)

Super pretty, right? Not reclaimed wood (at least I don't think so), but local, so that's a plus.

I am still thinking that in any case I'd like to get a bench for one side, and then Parsons chairs for the other side and the ends. I'm still in love with these, but trying to decide on a table before I commit to ordering them...

(Photo from Overstock.com)

So what do you guys think? Painted farmhouse table? Or a dark stain to match the beams, counter, and chair legs? Or scrap the farmhouse table altogether and go with a slab? Decisions! As a reminder, here's what we're working with now... so any of these would be an exponential improvement.

Dining room daydreams

As you may have noted in my New Year's post, our dining room situation right now is a little bit lame. We've been on the hunt for a big, chunky farmhouse style table (in fact I've been pinning images of them on my Pinterest page... well, ever since I joined Pinterest), but we haven't found the exact right thing just yet. Or maybe we have, but we just haven't met it in person - behold this beauty:

This image is from a company called Woodland Creek Furniture, which is located up in northern Michigan. This particular table is made from reclaimed barn wood from right here in the state - and you know we have a little bit of a thing for reclaimed barn wood. OK, more than a little bit of a thing - more like a full-blown obsession with its eco-fabulousness and charmingly perfect imperfection.

So I'm sitting here in the living room, staring into the mostly empty dining room, and occasionally holding my computer up and squinting to try to imagine this table in there. Of course this turned into a full-blown chair search, because I have lots of work to do and this is what I do instead. I'd like to get a long bench that matches the table for the side closer to the kitchen, to keep everything feeling open and tied together (instead of having the backs of chairs facing the rest of the main living area). We currently have a couple of ladder back chairs, but I am thinking of ditching them in favor of upholstered parsons chairs instead.

I like the soft tonal stripes on these chairs, and I think they'd play well with the wall color in the dining room (Silver Fox), but Brandon said they reminded him of a circus tent (most boring circus ever?!). We kept looking and turned up these:

(both chair images from www.overstock.com)

I love the bold pattern on these, and the dark brown would match a lot of elements in the house (ceiling beams, counter) - but I wonder if they would be too crazy? The more I stare at them the more I love them, actually. What do you think, oh wise internet friends?

2012, seriously?!

My gosh, another year bites the dust. Out with the year we built Turtle House, in with the (first) year we get to LIVE in Turtle House! I could get used to this, but what does it mean for the blog? Well, my updates are going to be less dramatic, that's for sure. However, we still have a lot of settling in to do, and a long list of projects to complete around the house (I'm going to write a post on this to keep us accountable!), so I plan to keep updating. Just don't expect me to keep up the pace of the professional contractors, ha!

I wanted to share a few projects that have been completed in the last week, and then some photos of the house in its current state. First off, the wood stove pipe installers came last Tuesday to run the pipe out the ceiling. It was going to run straight up and out the dormer, but when the guys got up there and knocked on the ceiling they got worried because it sounded like a rafter was just exactly in the way of where the pipe was supposed to go. Lucky for them (and us), the house belongs to an obsessive photodocumenter (that would be me). I pulled up photos from when the dormer was being built, and yes indeedy, there was a big ol' rafter in the way. The only option then was put an angle in the pipe - I like to describe it as "jaunty."

Hahaha. It looks a little funny, but it's actually not very noticeable unless you're someone who spends a lot of time looking at the ceiling. And it's totally worth it for the fantasticness that is the wood stove. Here is B starting our very first fire. The installer told us that we should start it really tiny and build it up over the course of 3-4 hours, so that's what we did. We have had it going pretty much constantly since then, and in fact we've been heating the whole house this way.

Another project that we wanted to tackle was getting the media cabinet set up. This involved squirming through a tiny access opening to plug everything in behind the shelf so we won't see any wires from the living room. My cousin, his girlfriend and their dog were visiting at the time, so he got recruited to help out (thanks Josh!). As you can see below, this required some auxiliary equipment (headlamp and beer). The guys got it all done though, speakers wired and all, so now we can watch TV, stream stuff on the internet, or listen to records all from the same central receiver/projector setup. It's fantastic.

We really wanted to get this set up because we'd invited some people over for New Year's Eve. Who hosts a party a week and a half after moving in? Crazy people, that's who. So we spent a lot of time trying to make the main level of the house look moderately sane. I ran around and took some photos before everyone arrived. Starting off upstairs, here's the bedroom, which is pretty clean but lacking in a bed. Our closets are still full of boxes of clothes, because we ordered one of those storage beds with drawers in it, and we're waiting for it to arrive. Once I get the closet doors painted and some window treatments, this room will be done! For now, anyway.

This is the "little room," the backup guest room upstairs. It has become the random junk room. Also note the unpainted but caulked trim... still some work to do here!

This is the stairway landing, where we plan to build in bookshelves. That's not done yet, so instead we just piled all of the boxes containing books into the space where the shelves will be. It's not quite the same effect.

However, things got better from there - for example, we had some exceptionally handsome butlers to meet the guests...

(yes they are indeed wearing bow ties - we're fancy around here)

...and the living room looked pretty darn good if I do say so myself.

We set up a bunch of snacks along the bar - it was perfect because everyone always ends up standing around the food anyway, right?

The dining room is looking a little sparse since we're missing, um, a dining room table and chairs. We brought in the table from our old L-shaped breakfast nook so we'd have a place for drinks/desserts. Eventually I want to refinish (or re-poly) this table and bench set because it fits perfectly on the covered porch, so that will be its eventual home (when it's warm enough to sit outside!).

Finally, I want to send the biggest thank you to our friends who came and helped us ring in 2012 in our new home. We had an absolute blast and received some of the sweetest and most thoughtful housewarming gifts - a new doormat (which we sorely needed), a great photo that a friend took and had printed on canvas, a home-brewed beer with a hand-drawn Turtle House label (I need to get photos of both of these to share!), and... drum roll please...

I am going to be in big trouble for posting this because it is not finished, but I just can't resist. This is a painting by our amazing talented hilarious friend Corey. He took it away with him to finish it so we don't have it hung up yet, but I've been scheming about a place of honor for it (probably in the living room). And, to be honest, I can't think too hard about this without totally choking up about how lucky we are to have such amazing people in our lives. Happy New Year, everyone.