Goldilocks and the Broken Toes

Once upon a time…(HEY!  I thought she said the next post would be about Kitchen chairs?)

Yes, indeed.  This IS about kitchen chairs…counter stools to be specific.

Question: What’s a DIY counter-height harvest table without chairs?
Answer: A large surface that accumulates mail.

Before making any seating decisions for our new table, we wanted to first try chairs we already had.  I mean, we should make sure we were actually happy with this new higher farm-style table in our kitchen, right?

Are we happy?  DEFinitely.

Well, happy as you can be when you have to STAND at the table, because what we had on hand was NOT a good fit for people with upper legs.

We needed chairs.   And this time, I wanted to get the right size chairs!

Remember these?

These are the too tall, bar-height stools at our counter-height kitchen island.  Somehow, we thought it would be a good idea to order stools with brass nailheads and kick plates…for a kitchen with silver-hued light fixtures and handles.  If you’ve been here a while, you may remember I finally caught on and painted the nailheads “silver-ish”.

The chairs are actually very nice and very well made, but I’ve never found them to be “kitcheny”.  I think the black leather seat puts the bar vibe in barstool.  …As if I should be serving the family Manhattans instead of mac and cheese.  I don’t know exactly how they came to appear in our kitchen, but yeesh!

Mr. and I each deny ordering them, so I guess the dogs must have done it.  I guarantee it wasn’t me…I’m way too cheap to order from Mr.’s favorite home store (Although let me tell you, I’m grateful that he even HAS a favorite home store #countyourblessings! )  

Would I like them at an actual in-home bar?   I could absolutely see them in that setting (accompanied by a pomegranate margarita, please). But since they’re in the kitchen, every time I sit on those stools, I feel like there should be a cigarette bobbing from my mouth and a long dangle of ash about to drop into whatever vegetable I’m chopping.

Yes…I think that paints the picture perfectly.

Frugal-me suggested cutting down the pricey “meh” barstools to the proper height…but Mr. was afraid that if we cut them down, we’d be shimming the legs with sugar packets every time we used them.

No one can say I didn’t pretend to  give a half-hearted try to making those barstools work…

“Well,” she said, while in full denial that this was her manipulatively fiendish plot all along, “I guess I could look for NEW chairs to fit both the table and the island.”

Mr. was fully on board.  Yay!

Shopping on-line for new counter stools was actually a fun process.  I mean, except for all the returns… and the actual process.

(Which reminds me…there are some affiliate links in this post*.  I don’t use affiliates very often, and there’s no cost to you if I include them.  It’s just that IF I choose to make a referral, I like the store to know where it originated. K?)

I thought we might want to try something a little funky, like an industrial style counter-stool.

I had envisioned these popular Tolix-style bistro chairs…which my daughters and I LOVED…

but “someone else” wasn’t a fan.

Still hoping for “funky,” I moved my focus to reproduction “Toledo-style” swivel stools.

This is an actual Toledo Swivel stool:

and this is a popular reproduction style with an added back rest.

The bases are a little clunky, but i thought that the swivel might be a nice feature and would ALSO make the stools height-adjustable to accommodate our six 5’4″ to 6’4″ family members.

THEN I envisioned little visitors sitting in the chairs swiveling side to side…or should I say banging the seatback into the lovingly crafted, soft-wood table top and chunking pieces out of it with every swivel.  THAT would be a little TOO much distressing.  SO…sadly, I started to rule those out…UNTIL I saw…

(cue trumpet fanfare)

THESE linen-covered marvels from Christopher Knight Home (YES, THAT Christopher Knight!!!  “Peter Brady” now sells these chairs):

• Swivel? Check!
• Height-adjustable? Check!
• Won’t wreck the table if being used by swiveling urchins?  Check!

I ordered one to try it out and LO and BEHOLD!  The linen upholstery was a spot-on match for the sofas in the adjacent family room.

If you’re new here, you might be thinking, “Wow…that was easy!  Sounds perfect!”

Well, NOT in this house, sister.

Four out of six family members were really happy with them…until the “fourth” stubbed his big toe more than once on the clunky base.  (It was just ONE chair!!! How does this happen?)  It then quickly became three “for” to three “against.”  FYI, the females were all in, the males were all out.  (There’s likely a logical conclusion to be drawn from this gender divide…but I digress.)

SIGH.

That’s when I discovered a very fun way to shop for chairs with my cell phone.  Target has a feature that allows you to see many of their chairs as if they were in your kitchen.  At first, I became a virtual Goldilocks trying to get the chairs to properly scale and align with our table.

This chair was much too BIG.

This chair was much too SMALL…

This one was juuuuust right!

Our virtual try-on yielded three contenders, all of which were lovely (although none was really the look I had intended).  I ordered one of each to see which we would like best “in person” and have to say that although they required assembly, each was very sturdy and well made.

The gray print “Goldilocks” chair turned out to be the family favorite (although it wasn’t mine…I was still liking the swivels best).  I also thought the print was too-similar-to the adjacent family room roman shades I made last year.

I loved the large-scale, bright print of the third one…but it was very creamy “beige” vs “off-white” and didn’t seem to play well “in person” with the room.

OY!

I REALLY didn’t want this to turn into a year of a table with no chairs (not to mention a mountainous mail pile), so I bit the bullet and just ordered five more of the gray print.  Not perfect, but DONE!

(Or so I thought…)

After they arrived and I already had assembled two more of them, Mr said–now that his toe had healed–he thought we should STAY with the SWIVEL chairs. He liked them better.

Seriously…this is how things work here.

So, I carefully took apart the FIVE assembled chairs, and carefully repacked them for the next person who might purchase them, then schlepped all eight chairs back to Target…where the clerks were VERY nice about taking them back.  WAY nicer that I would have been.

THEN, I raced home and ordered five more swivel chairs for the table and four backless versions for the kitchen island before there were any more mind changes.  Merry Christmas to ME!

They must have been a good pick…because my niece (mother to two of the aforementioned visiting urchins) liked them enough to order the same chairs for her new basement bar.  The only thing I will say (as a mildly obsessive perfectionist of my own DIY projects) is that the upholstery on the back of the seat backs is a tad, well, sloppy).

Anyway, NOW, that we have a table AND chairs, I’m having a little difficulty luring the family back to the table. Being allowed to eat, recline, and watch television at the same time was right up their collective alleys.

But it’s happening.  We’re definitely eating at the same table (on the rare occasion when we’re all home).

And remember when I said the linen fabric was a spot on match for the sofas in the Family Room?  Well, “spot on” has now come to mean that when you prepare food at a kitchen island, you’re likely to get a SPOT ON the linen.  

But, no matter, I have plenty of Folex for now (and an exciting new idea for the “list o’projects”.)

Mr. continues to stub his toes on the bases… and now that there are TEN clunky bases in our kitchen, the frequency of this phenomenon has become ridiculously repetitive.

Seriously!  NO. ONE. ELSE. in the house has this problem!  I know it hurts; I mean, the black and blue pedicure says it all.  But it was happening SO much that it started becoming a legitimate challenge to suppress incredulous giggles every time I heard:

BAM, “Ow! *#$%!”

Poor Mr!  He was trying to work with it; but I’m no monster, those chairs were going to get donated. Take one last look:

Mr was not deterred, however, and found a solution.  Hooray! He now wears hard-soled slippers that seem to do a good job of protecting his feet.  Plus, he is starting to get better at using those two lovely blue things God installed at the top of his face for collision avoidance.

We still occasionally hear BAM; but not, “Ow! *#$%!”

Maybe he’s just lost the feeling in his feet.  Surprisingly, though, he also says the chairs were a great choice.

Either way, Papa Bear is happy, Mama Bear is happy, and all the baby bears FINALLY have a place at the table.

THE END… (sure it is).

 

*The links in this post contain affiliate links and I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on my link…again, at no cost to you.