How To Buy A Dining Room Table In 24 Easy Steps

1) You don’t need a dining room table. You don’t have a dining room. You have some space in your living area that you use for eating, and the table you have right now is fine, thanks.

2) Anyway, you hate buying furniture.

3) Admittedly your sister-in-law walked into your apartment for the first time and said, “Hey! Once you get some real furniture in here, I think this will be nice!”

4) But what is “real furniture”? For years you used a dresser that your husband’s ex-stepmother found in a field on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. For years you slept on a futon frame you and your then-boyfriend found on 2nd Avenue and carried upstairs. It was broken, half of it sloped, so you and your then-boyfriend slept curled up like a quotation mark on one half of the bed.

5) Isn’t that kind of romantic?

6) This was before you’d heard about bedbugs.

7) The dining room table you have now — in the living area — has four wobbly legs and is covered with a glass top that no longer adheres to anything, so it swivels around when you touch it. It’s chipped and dinged, but you think it still looks pretty nice.

8) You got it for free a decade ago from your then-boyfriend’s father’s friend, who you have never seen since. It has served you well. Who throws away something that has served them well, simply because it’s beginning to show its age? Why not start a bonfire and throw the Velveteen Rabbit on it too?

9) Speaking of rabbits, was there ever a children’s movie more beautiful and disturbing than Watership Down?

10) The fact remains: Your mom feels affronted by your dining room table. She also feels affronted by your chairs which, to be fair, aren’t proper dining chairs at all but a motley collection of cast-offs from your childhood home. You’ve had them for a decade too. Your mom is tired of you being such a spendthrift pennypincher. She frames this issue as one about your child. I want her to have a proper table to color on, that’s all, she says. My granddaughter deserves a proper table. It’s a birthday present for her. Let me give her a present.

11) Fine. Okay. Thank you! That’s very generous! We appreciate it.

12) The dining set arrives. It’s huge, roughly the size of a cruise ship or the Bermuda Triangle. Meant for a formal dining room, it stands in your apartment imperiously like a movie star in a ball gown, taking up your floor space, as though demanding to know what you mean by expecting it to put up with these conditions. You want to beg the moving men, Take it back, please take it back, don’t leave me with this, but you know they can’t so why make them feel any worse than they already do by having inflicted this on you?

13) You apologize and overtip and shut the door behind the movers. As much as possible, you keep your distance from the dining set, trying not to make eye contact with the table and chairs.

14a) The table and chairs don’t make eye contact with you either. They still manage to make you feel inferior.

14b) No one can make you feel inferior without your consent — Eleanor Roosevelt. You wonder how she dealt with her parents as a still young-ish adult.

15) After several phone calls, you manage to arrange to get the set picked up again and returned in a matter of days. Until then you will simply have to put up with each other. You try to explain the matter to your mother without hurting her feelings. You tell her it was your fault for not checking measurements. Her feelings are hurt anyway, you can tell. Also your husband is annoyed.

16) The table is gone. Bliss! The apartment has never felt so spacious, so free. Now all you have to do is scour the website from which your mom bought the table and find an adequate replacement, a smaller dining set that will please you, your husband, and your mother, that is in the same price range as the original.

17) Results: 0

18) Okay, how about one that will please your husband and your mother.

19) Results: 0

20) Okay, how about chairs? Just four chairs. Four nice chairs that will please your husband and your mother and that you don’t mind the look of. Can we manage that?

21) Why not six chairs? Couldn’t you use six chairs, for when you entertain?

22) Four chairs are fine, Mom, really, thanks. We only need four.

23) The chairs arrive. They’re … wood? They’re fine. Whatever. Proper chairs, yay!

24) Six months into the process, you are no closer to getting a new table. Luckily, the new chairs look okay next to the old one.

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