Fine dining, finally

For five years, I lived in an apartment without a dining room. Entertaining was limited to brunch in the backyard, because the picnic table could seat more than the tiny cafe table in the kitchen.



I finally got a dining room in Dec. when I moved into an actual house with Mr. Barefoot.

However, years of the peripatetic student life had left us both with only a few sticks of furniture. And certainly no table with presence enough to fill our sunlit dining room.

Enter the Wooden Duck's moving sale. If you need furniture, and you're in the Bay Area, you can't get there soon enough! Did I mention this stuff is HALF OFF?!?! Beautiful solid wood, sustainable furniture for half price - or less! They were selling a bunch of pine chair for $30 each.

The Wooden Duck makes beautiful furniture from recycled, reclaimed wood. This is solid, high quality stuff that will last forever, and no forests were destroyed to make it. Plus, the aged wood has a special patina, and suffers less from shrinking and warping.

We found the most beautiful coffee table made from a huge slab of polished, recycled walnut, complete with sanded knots and burls, and a raw edge. It has such great organic style.

(like this, from here, as there are no images on the Wooden Duck's website.)

But even better is the dining table, made from recycled Douglas fir, probably from an old barn. This thing is SOLID. The tabletop must be two inches thick.

We picked out a bunch of simple, solid reclaimed teak chairs to go with it. The chairs, along with the sideboard, are going to get stained to match the table. All of this stuff was half price!

I can't wait until they're delivered.

Things I Didn't Know I Needed #2

We haven't made a gift registry yet. We haven't even thought about it (much). Though we've both been living on our own for a long time, we've both been students much of that time. When we moved in together, we discovered that we had duplicates of lots of things - but that a lot of those things were pretty crappy. And then there are major gaps: dining room table, anyone?

I imagine our registry will be pretty eclectic, aimed at filling in gaps and upgrading (cookware, especially) to things that will last a lifetime. (wow. I don't think I've ever typed or said that phrase before!)

Here are some current contenders, awesome gadgets that I didn't even know existed until recently.

Apparently, a mandoline makes the slicing of veggies, and therefore food prep, infinitely quicker.



I love, love, love seltzer water, or spark, as the Flower Boy calls it. But I hate, hate, hate the waste generated by oodles of plastic bottles, so I rarely buy it. I mainly drink it overseas, where you can get it in reuseable glass bottles. But if we had a seltzer water maker, I could drink bubbly to my heart's content.