New Thing #23: New Dining Room Set

I wrote last week about how much I enjoyed our visit to Bob's Discount Furniture a little more than a week ago. Part of what made it such a great shopping experience was some cool furniture...including what would become our new dining room table.

But the table isn't the whole story - there's the chairs, of course.

And the bench.

The bench?

Yes, the bench.

How cool is this?

We really liked two tables - one your more traditional table and chairs, and the other a table and chairs and bench.

We ended up going with the one with the bench. Six chairs and a bench, to be exact. (We still have a kid in a high chair, so right now five chairs, a bench, a high chair, and an extra chair in the living room.)

We were actually worried it was going to be too big for our dining room, but it had a leaf so we thought we'd only use the leaf if necessary.

Turns out with the leaf it's perfect.

It's nice to have a meal without the table wobbling, sitting in chairs that you're confident will support you.

And I like that my daughters are going to grow up with the coolest dining room table on the block.

New Thing #17: Bob's Discount Furniture

I hate the commercials for Bob's Discount Furniture. I never saw them until I moved to Massachusetts.

I don't know if that's because they started here or not, but I do know that now they're on in New York as well. I'm sure that before the year 2000 or so they were not.

Regardless, they're annoying commercials.

But I discovered this past week that the store is fantastic.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the need for a new dining room set became urgent this week.

On Saturday we went to Bob's to see what they had.

We ended up with a great new dining room set. (Stay tuned - when it arrives it'll certainly be a "New Thing".)

But we also ended up with a great new experience. First of all, the store has some pretty great furniture and compared to other local furniture stores the prices are great. (I'm always amazed at how expensive things are at Jordan's Furniture, which prides itself on its 'underprices'. "If those are underprices I'd hate to see their overprices," I like to say. No one likes me saying it.) But even better, there's a little fish pond inside the store, which the girls loved, and there's also a cafe with what I believe are free snacks and beverages.

I don't know exactly what's in the cafe - I didn't venture there yet. I didn't want to take the girls back there and have them wanting all the snacks.

But I figure I can just do it next time. Because I'll most certainly be back.

New Thing #10: Breaking A Chair By Sitting In It

Spoiler Alert: One of the upcoming "New Things" was going to be a trip to a furniture store to buy new dining room furniture. That's going to have to happen sooner rather than later.

During dinner Wednesday night, the chair I was sitting in went right out from under me.

And it was kind of hilarious.

A couple of things you need to know:

1) I have been thinking an awful lot about my weight lately. This incident did me no favors.

2) The dining room table and chairs are hand-me-downs. My wife and I have had them for almost ten years now...and they go back in her family much farther than that.

So they were definitely on the way out. We'd have to pop the dowels connecting the legs to the seat back in every once in a while to make sure the chairs weren't getting too flimsy.

That's kind of what made this so hilarious. As I was eating Wednesday, I felt the chair shift when one of the dowels popped out. I bent to look to my right, to see if it was something I could quickly fix. And when I shifted my weight, the chair totally gave.

My daughters (and, to a slightly lesser extent, my wife) were quite concerned, so that was a nice side result. But I was fine. (Other than my hurt pride. Seriously, no matter what your weight situation - I'm definitely not too overweight - a chair breaking under you is going to do some ego damage.)

This could have been a funny "New Thing" even if I had staged it, allowing it to break below me, cartoon-style, knowing the chair was going to break someday.

The fact that it happened organically makes it even better.