Thursday, November 21, 2013

The Chocolate Pineapple Doilies

When we bought our house earlier this year, we were so excited to have an actual dining room, because it meant that we could have an actual dining room table, with actual dining room chairs, which meant we could have actual dinners. Swanky!

It doesn't take much to excite us.

The plan had been to build ourselves a neat table from reclaimed wood, or order a beautiful Amish built heirloom table, but time(children) and money(house) ended up pushing both of those ideas off into the future. The very, very, very distant future.

But, we still needed a table and chairs.

So we started scouring our local thrift stores and yard sales, fully prepared to do some refinishing. After several month we still had not found anything that suited our needs(seated at least 6 people, had six chairs and was around two hundred bucks or less). We were about to throw in the towel when I came across a cute little vintage drop leaf table set listed in one of the local swap/yard sale pages on facebook.

This is a terrible photo of it, but you get the idea.


One of the things that I love about old furniture(these pieces are circa 30's/40's, best I can tell) is that it always has a story. Sometimes you know the story, and sometimes you are left to wonder/figure it out. I cannot tell you about the early life of this furniture, but I can tell you that the gentleman I bought it from had suddenly lost his wife only three weeks before, and he was selling everything, including his house, so that he and his teen aged daughter could relocate to be with his son and grandbabies in another state.

I do not know how his wife died, but I do know that this table and chairs was witness to such sorrow and heartache in the last days of it's former life, that it hopefully will feel a sense of hopefulness and new life in our young, growing, crazy household.

Or maybe it is just furniture, and I'm just crazy.

Either way, we also purchased this beautiful buffet from the same nice gentleman.


So, what does any of this have to do with doilies? Personally, I feel like a house is not a home unless there are a few doilies spread about.

Unfortunately, I do not make doilies.

Fortunately, my mama does!

So I asked for a doily for my table, and I received this one-


Oh, it is so lovely! I just love it. So much so that I decided that I needed another for the buffet.

Lucky me, Mama obliged!

And so I received this one too-



Is this gorgeous or what?!

As you may have noticed in the photos above, I ended up deciding to use the long doily for the buffet and the round one for the table, instead of my original plan.



Pay no attention to how off center the doily is. It doesn't make it any less pretty. It just means that my homemaking skills are not at peak performance right now.

Oh who am I trying to kid?!

A wonkily placed doily is pretty par for the course in this zoo of a house. I'm just trying to survive each new day's adventure. Magazine perfection is not compatible with our lifestyle.

And I'm pretty sure we aren't the only ones.

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