We have a beautiful dining room table, a teak Danish piece with a hidden leaf which we have out all the time, so it's huge. For about 3 years now it's been our family craft table. I cover it with oil cloth and never really see the top unless we have family over for brunch, or I am replacing the oil cloth. At first I sort of cringed when we would craft on this amazing piece of furniture, but now I'm used to it. It means our dining room is a craft palace, complete with a sweet little chandelier we installed 2 years ago, thinking we would be able to use the dining room as, you know, a dining room—but it hasn't really ever turned out that way. This formal dining table is our home base for so much of our daily activity, cleaning it is near impossible. It's more like sorting stacks. Stacks upon stacks.
For meal time we all crowd around a very small table in the kitchen. A table that belonged to my husband's family, the table that was in their kitchen, not their formal dining room table. We have had it forever, in all of our apartments and then after we were married, and we always laughed at how his family of four squeezed around this small table for dinner every night. This was back when there were just two of us. Now we squeeze around it for every meal, but instead of 4, as it was in his family, it's 5 of us. We always meant to get a larger kitchen table to eat around, but it's such a workhorse and has lasted so long, and now we are used to it. Plus, it fits in the kitchen perfectly.
