Our Table At Home

Safer At Home has launched us into an interesting opportunity. We get to stay home. For those who love to home make, it is our fondest wish come true, right? Yet, I am sure there will be the hard places to live through. We could still get sick, I suppose. Or simply bored. So I would like to suggest that as home makers this would be a great time to hone our skills in making our homes beautiful, healthy, and safe.

It so happens that we are moved out of the stone house into the little cabin beside it. In a word, we traded dwellings with Lance’s.

This little cabin has almost no room for a table. And a table we must have. At our house a table is the center of what happens at home. So we had to dream up a way to have a very small table that would work for our needs.

What this cabin does have is a large picture window in front … the perfect place to look out at the birds and woods while seated at the table. The coffee bar that we’ve used and loved that you’ve seen so many times here full of coffee makings and pots could be transformed into a table, I dreamed, pushed up to the window. Two bar stools could allow us to be seated there for dinner.

Elv, who makes all my dreams come true, decided that it was too narrow for eating at. After much discussion and maybe even a little arguing he leapt right out of the box, which is why I like this man in the first place, and replaced the top two planks with two wider laminated hardwood planks that usually would serve as a semi-truck van floor. In the middle of our big house trading that day, I gave it three coats of water based sealer. Varnishing wood is to my brain what gardening or music is to yours, perhaps. Each time I would get stumped that day with what was coming in the door to be arranged or discarded, I would sand the last dry coat and add the new. It is beautiful. I brought home the stools for it. Perfect fit.

We’re playing Catan and Upwords at this table. We’re sitting here writing. We’re eating meals here. I bought flowers for the centerpiece. It becomes extra counter space when needed. It’s made this little cabin home.

And so could your table. While everyone is home and the house is bombed, maybe a little surcease could be bought by clearing and decorating the family table. Set a pretty table there. Go ahead and have flowers and a candle. Make a “saferathome” mandate that the table is for use for all your homeschooling and creating and cooking and computer-ing needs. But, at the end of the day, it gets cleared and pretty for supper. No exceptions. You’ll be blessed.