Kitchen table sorted?

You might have seen a post late last year about the kitchen table situation round my house. 

The kitchen looked as it does below, which looked OK, but when we had lots of family over for a Sunday lunch, and moved the table temporarily over to the bench so we could all fit in, it transformed the room dramatically. Made it feel nicer. And put us on a mission.

We tried out about 100 different configurations to deal with the fact that we suddenly had a gaping void filling most of the kitchen (you can see those here).

I put it out on Facebook and Twitter and you were all marvellously helpful. We tried out every (great!) suggestion. Including adding a little table onto the side of the big table to make it bigger, which we lived with until last weekend. Like everything else we'd tried – including secondary little table over in the cooking area (made us feel like we were in a restaurant) and a little table by the bench instead (defeated the aim of keeping our cosy, Sunday lunch vibe), it didn't quite work.

Someone had suggested a butcher's block sort of a thing over by the cooking area. We tried the idea with the new table we'd bought especially to solve the problem (but which had failed to do so). It looked odd; it had space underneath for chairs and so the void under the table simply amplified the void we were trying to fill. Putting chairs there looked even odder.

We tried it with the little drinks trolley the dog has adopted as his bed instead. It looked sillier still. And on that, we foolishly abandoned the concept. And then, while having a cup of tea and idly wondering about the little desk I'd just re-acquired from my parents' house (it was the one I once did my homework on), I tried it for size. It worked, people!

Well, I think so. What do you reckon? It's something – I think – about the depth of the table underneath its top. You can't comfortably sit at it on a chair unless you're under the age of 10. So no incongruous chairs, just my Ikea stool for reaching the tall cupboards. And a drawer! We're thinking of replacing the top with a nice thick slab of wood. Though I quite like that the tabletop has a burn mark, probably from the 1970s (it was my mum and dad's kitchen table before it was my desk). It also has some graffiti scrawled by me in crayon inside the drawer.

And, finally, there's a cosy bit of the kitchen to have a cup of tea in.

I'll post up a few more kitchen pictures soon, I've been busy with the paint brushes...

Thanks again for all your table tips. Whoever suggested the butcher's block, I salute you.

Post by Kate