Dinner’s on the table!
The introduction of a dining table to our home has taken us up the next step to fully fledged adulthood.
We’ve lived here for seven months and 13 days now (to be precise). The weekly trips to Ikea we did in the early days ground to a necessary halt sometime before Christmas when our bank balances and patience could take it no more. We’d got everything we needed to set up home and took the opportunity to enjoy living here for a bit, and to start looking at each other as more than just flat pack constructing robots.
But this weekend the time came to start the next phase of flat development. Complacency kept us warm throughout the winter as we patted ourselves on the back for the excellent curtains selection we made in November, but with the Spring light of day flooding in through the window, we could no longer hide from the gaps we were still yet to fill.
We needed a big mirror for the lounge wall, a chest of drawers for the bedroom and, most importantly, a dining table for the kitchen. Eating on our laps is all well and good but as we finally admit that university life is a distant memory, the purchase of a table is an essential step to civilised living.
And the trip was very successful. All items were purchased and brought home in once piece – or at least the correct number of flat pack parts – and, after a quick beans on toast lunch to help us recover from the shopping ordeal, the assembling process commenced – starting with the table. And what a beauty she is.
We had our first table based dinner this evening and if our life were a computer game, which I’m delighted that it’s not, I think this move would have marked our move up to the next level. We had a nice chat, we used mats and coasters, and we didn’t watch a moment of TV the whole time. “I think having dinner at the table will be good for us,” I said, “It’ll give us more time to chat.” A polite raise of the eyebrows and silent nod of the head was as good a response as I could have hoped for to such a declaration as I watched his dreams of a lifetime of dinners in front of rugby highlights seep out through the ceiling.
So now this house feels like a real home. We can eat, we can sleep and we can sit down just like they do in adverts. All we need to do now is buy enough furniture so that other people can do all those things too should they happen to pop by. We might need an extension to fit it all in.