Let me set this up by saying that I am not, as you may be able to guess by my screen name, a furniture connoiseur.
Now that that's out of the way, I think it's time to start buying decent furniture, and we need to start with the dining room table. We recently knocked out a wall and have a big dining room now. In the middle of it sits an ex-Goodwill 6' long trestle table with 2 mismatched benches, and when we have company (typically totaling 10-20 people, we pull out the folding tables and mismatched folding chairs.
This has been fine, but we've got room for a 10' long table with 12 matching chairs, and dang it, I want one. Solid wood, maybe of Amish make. We went and looked at some stores a couple hours away, and really liked the 'boat table' design with a trestle frame, and those wooden chairs with their deeply carved seats and curved backs were actually super comfortable....I didn't realize I'd never sat in a comfortable wooden chair until then. Dang things probably weighed 40 lbs each and Lord knows what the table weighed.
So we could get this table in a collapsed length of 6' with a total of 4 leaves that could be added to get it out to 10'. If you buy the leaves without the skirting, they'll self-store in the collapsed table. Not sure if I like the look of that, though.
Anywayz, I got a mild heart attack when we got the price. NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS for a table and 10 chairs, notice that's two chairs less than what I was aiming for. This was in Hickory.....the same set in Oak is about $1500 less. The chairs are about $600 EACH, with the table making up the rest. I *can* afford this, BTW. I somehow muddled into not being poor, but I still have the poor person's habit of saying, "THAT THING COSTS HOW MUCH?"
I do appreciate some good craftsmanship, and I'm stuck on the boat table style, so I'm not interested in buying a cut-rate rectangle table on CL.....but I do need a reality check here. Is this what good-quality furniture costs nowadays? I've already lived the hand-me-down and Ikea life, and I'm tired of junk.
I've always bought used stuff, I know how to find used stuff, I know how to buy used stuff, I know where to buy used stuff, my question is about new stuff. Just to hopefully keep the discussion from going off the rails immediately.....