Monday, November 6, 2017

First world problems

My too large kitchen
One of the issues with the new house that has literally been keeping me up at night (!!) is the fact that I'll no longer have a full size, eat in kitchen.  Hear me out.

Right now, we have a dining room with table, 6 chairs, sideboard, china closet and a few other pieces of furniture.  Except for my sewing room, its my favorite room in the house even though we hardly use it.

We also have a kitchen, with a table and 4 chairs.

This is a lot of seating for 2 people who don't often have company for dinner.

Trying to decide where these will go
New house has a breakfast nook, and I have a perfect small table in the attic.

But what about the dining room?  My current set is dark wood.  Its beautiful, and it really suits the room it's in now.  The new dining room is probably the same size, but it's lighter and the woodwork is painted white.  It just won't look the same.

I do, however, have a cabinet and pie safe that are the same color wood as the kitchen set. Also another cabinet built by my uncle that is nearly the same. And while I'm not in love with the table and chairs, they're sturdy and perfectly good.

We were at the new house yesterday for the inspection, and I realized that, except for the kitchen table and chairs, I could probably make it all fit.  But I'm not going to.  This move is my chance to lighten up, whether I like the process or not.

Turns out what I love about my current dining room furniture is how good it looks in my current dining room. The few pieces I'm actually sentimentally attached to match the other set.  So I'm letting go.  I'm sure I have other things that will fit into those empty spaces I found yesterday, and it might be a nice change to actually be able to see the baseboards.

I have this hope that I might be a better housekeeper if I have less stuff to clean.  Certainly that white woodwork isn't going to let me get away with as much.

How about you? Do you have irrational attachments to certain pieces of furniture?

7 comments:

Carolyn (Diary of a Sewing Fanatic) said...

So are you having a yard sale, trucking it all down the thrift store, Craig listing it? What!!! I'm happy for you as you move into this next stage of your life!

Nursebennett said...

Yes, I have strong attachment to some pieces of furniture, though I know that past me, or possibly the little one we adopted three years ago, no one will care about it. That saddens me, as my father handcrafted most of the items from wood we chose together at a specialty lumberyard. I also helped him construct our king size bed and am determined it will be the last item I let go of. Hugs to you as you figure out what to let go and what to keep. In our past move I did some and it was harder than I realized.

edj3 said...

We lost all but four pieces of furniture when we flooded in 2009, and while that was pretty much an awful experience all the way around, I also found it incredibly freeing. We chose new furniture very carefully and with an eye toward under-furnishing rather than stuffing our place full. It's worked well for us (although I don't recommend the flood method for decluttering).

Nancy K said...

In the long run they are just things and while I have several pieces of custom handmade modern pieces of furniture that I love, if they don't fit when we eventually downsize, I have no problem selling them. My big collection is my fabric which I have thinned. I have small collections of pottery that I really love but not too large; I don't love to dust and I don't love clutter. Friends of ours have an incredible collection, most of it inherited from parents and grandparents who were huge collectors, many of the pieces are incredible, like the collection of Maria posts his mother bought from the potter many years ago. But all I see are things to be dusted. You may get the idea that I hate to dust, because I do. Sometimes things end up owning us, so I think that you will find it all very freeing.
Enjoy your new home and remember if you sell it you don't have to move it!

Sharon L said...

Unfortunately my attachments go much further than furniture! Knick-knacks, clothes, lots of odds and ends. I've been working on selling/donating the past couple of months. It really is freeing but difficult at the same time. You can do this!!

paloverdeblooms said...

Talk about irrational attachments to furniture, I've got it on both my mother's family side and my father's. My grandfather did woodworking as a hobby and made a number of furniture pieces as well as smaller items. We've still got all of the furniture and most of it is fairly ugly '40s/'50s "home" style stuff (not beautifully executed mid-century modern). What am I supposed to do? Throw it out? It's not the kind of stuff that would go over well in a secondhand shop.

And then there are my father's pieces from his family home. They're are late 19th century up through the 1920s. And what a hodge-podge. But they're part of what he inherited when he was orphaned as a boy. Again, what do I do?

All these things connect me to my grandparents and to the family past. They won't have any particular meaning to anyone else. And there is no one else in the family who would want them. Sigh.

Marjie said...

I have a dark mahogany dining room set, and the white walls and baseboard in my dining room set it off wonderfully. Mixing instead of matching can be a wonderful thing, too. Just helping you to confuse the issue here...good luck with the move.