You know your dining set is old when...

Oh the thrills of buying something new for your house!  It's like a double edged sword.  You're excited, because you've wanted to buy it for so long.  Yet you're sad, because you spend a lot of money on something and you're not sure it will live up to your expectations.

Ever since Hubby and I moved into our house, we knew we'd need a new dining room set.  We put it off and put it off, because we had better things to spend money on.  Well, the other day we were entertaining people and Hubby fell through his chair.  Yup, through the chair!  His face was precious.  It's the same face someone makes when they're leaning back in a chair and they pushed it just a little too far...bam!  Down they go.  It's one of the best shocked expressions someone has.  They know they won't get hurt, so it's a perfect combination of thrilling with a touch of scariness.

After Hubby fell through the chair, we deemed it unsafe for usage (for obvious reasons), and began the search for the new  set.  We had many conversations about what type of set we would get.  Afterall, you keep a dining room set for many years, and they're usually fairly expensive (I guess we won't be getting that new LED tv anytime soon).  We talked about wooden tables, metal tables, and combination wood/metal tables.

Now, I've told you before that we have 2 dogs.  Did I mention one of them eats wood?  Yes, he's very annoying special.  He ate part of our old set, our cabinets, and several other wooden things around the house.  Luckily, we have metal living room tables, with tiled tops.  Otherwise, I'm sure he would have eaten those to!

Taking the dog's eating habits into consideration (afterall we won't get rid of our dog), we decided on a metal table.  We exhaustingly happily searched through countless adds looking for metal table sets.  There's very few companies that build and sell these.  Apparently they aren't very popular for people who don't have wood eating dogs.

Finally, we found one we (oh yes it really is we) like at Ashley Furniture.  It has a black frame with tile layed under the glass top.  How perfect?!?  It even matches with our living room furniture, which is important, because the living room and kitchen are open to each other.

Now, can you believe that Ashley Furniture just happened to have a 50% off sale?  Really, how lucky can we get here?  So, we went in and purchased our set with 0 hesitation.  They told us 2 - 4 weeks until it would be ready to pick-up.  Annoyed at the prospect of waiting (don't we live in a NOW society?), but understanding that we wouldn't get it any faster; we twiddled our thumbs for 2 weeks.  Thankfully, they called just before the 2 week mark and told us it was in.  Thank you heaven!

This weekend we picked up our long awaited and highly anticipated dining room set.  The fun begins.  We are cheap conscientious with money, so we decided to not pay for them to deliver and set it up.  How hard can it really be to put together a table and chairs?  In a thruth - it wasn't hard.  It just took forever!  It took us 5 hours to put together 4 chairs and 1 table.  Ouch.  That hurt our confidence just a little.

You might be asking yourself, "Who buys just 4 chairs?"  You've got me.  I don't know.  Not us.  We bought 6.  So why pretell, did we only build 4?  Because 2 were missing hardware.  Seriously?  Out of 6 chairs - 2 were missing hardware?  I could go on and on about manufacturing processes that can be put in place to prevent something like this.  But I'm honestly glad 2 were missing hardware.  Why?  Because I don't think we could have put together 2 more chairs yesterday.  I think we would have had to admit defeat to our new dining room set.  It would have beaten us.  This way, we can say we beat it.  We put together everything we could and we beat it.  Yay to us!

We are extremely happy we purchased the new set, despite the manufacturing error.  It's important to look on the bright side of things.  The missing hardware allowed us to take time away from building more chairs so we wouldn't kill ourselves trying.  Plus, we picked all the pieces that weren't "perfect" and threw them in the reject chair box.  Ashley will be switching those chairs for new ones.

As for our old set?  Goodwill didn't want it - too many dog chew marks ;-)  That's ok.  We put it on the curb and it was gone in 2 hours.  Good bye old set, hello new set!  Hello new year.