A Story About Downsizing

A story about downsizing... the better choice (or some might say crazy) way!

My dining room is small and my dining room table was big. A solid timber six seater table that could extend to an eight seater. To give you some context; if people were seated at the table and someone wanted to get past there always had to be chair shuffling and a lot of ‘sucking in’. I wanted something smaller.

Sometimes good ideas take a while to form.

I tried selling my dining room suite in a garage sale; then on buy, swap & sell. The table is really heavy so from the time of the garage sale it stayed in the garage... meaning that husband’s car had to be parked outside.

There were plenty of nibbles, but no sale... not because I had priced it too high, but because the table was big and it wouldn't fit in people's spaces! Eventually I sold the eight chairs to a lady for $180.

Soon husband started to complain about his car park. And he and the kids may have started complaining about having to eat outside (we have an outdoor table and chair set on the deck) in the middle of summer with the flies and mosquitos. In all fairness to them... 'soon' had actually been 4 months!!

And then my husband made a joke about cutting the table in half. OMG, lightbulb moment! What a good idea! Could we do that?

It was easier than anticipated and there was no cutting of the table involved. It turns out, the table was already in two pieces and held together by the slider bit that extends the table! All we had to do was unscrew the slider bit and unscrew two legs from one piece. Then re-attach the legs to the other piece. Tada! A new smaller table!

Obviously if hubby had of suggested that earlier I would have kept some of our original chairs, but all good, with a little bit of patience, I ended up getting four second hand chairs on a buy, swap and sell site for $80. I have the table pushed against the window with three chairs and I have put the fourth one at my desk (you may remember from a FB post in February that I have been desk chair sharing with the kids) so if I need to, I can pull the table away from the window and seat four.

Then my clever husband whipped out his sewing machine and cut our big tablecloths in half, meaning I now have four tablecloths instead of two.

And there you have it.

I've downsized from an eight seater dining room suite to a four seater with tablecloths to fit, husband has his garage back and we can eat inside so everyone is happy! Including the planet because we've repurposed and reused and haven’t had to buy anything new.

Best of all, we still have the second half and the slider bit, so if we ever decide we do want a big table again, we just put it all back together! And the whole process actually MADE us $100!!

Side note: We are a family of five and some people have pointed out that we can only seat four inside now. My teens are currently 18, 15 and 13 and to be honest with everyone’s work commitments, social lives, and gym workouts we very rarely have five people at the table for dinner anymore. And if we do have 5 (or more due to visiting family, mates or girlfriends) we just sit out on the deck! It works for us.