The first dining suite that Rog and I bought together was way back when Alex and Oli were little more than babies, sometime during the last century. But I can still remember it as if it were yesterday, we made a trip to Ikea in Croydon, and brought it home on the roof of the car, then the little lads "helped" their Dad to assemble it. I dont remember how much we paid for it, but it wouldn't have been a huge amount, as money was quite short back then. As the chairs were wooden seated and non-standard in shape, I made some seat cushions from thick foam and covered them, it took me ages, but I was quite pleased with the results, photographic evidence exists somewhere, but I'm not going to bother to look for it now. That suite took a whole lot of bashing and battering from two growing boys and their friends, and by the time we moved away from Surrey it was looking decidedly shabby, so we took it to Wiltshire with us, but promised to invest in a new one at some future time. The house in Devizes had a really large and useful breakfast bar in the kitchen, so we never got round to buying the promised suite, and the old dining table just sat unused in the garage for over three and a half years, until we moved here.
By that time it was far too grubby and mucky to use as a dining table, so we put it outside the chalet (garden shed) to use as a potting table instead.
Meanwhile, indoors we still needed somewhere to sit and eat, so we used our large oval garden table with the original Ikea chairs - the seat cushions I had made were well past their sell-by date and had been removed, so I just tied on the garden chair cushions to make them slightly less uncomfortable.
Obviously this was only ever intended to be a temporary situation, and once we were fully unpacked and settled in, the hunt for the promised dining suite began in earnest. With four sons, two D-I-Ls (and counting) and a smattering of grandchildren, it really needed to be something quite large. Last week I found the ideal suite on ebay, large enough to seat us all, at a pinch. It only had eight chairs, two of which were carvers, but as the number of times we'd need to seat more than that would be very few, extra chairs could be drafted in from other places to make up the numbers. So I kept an eye on it for six days, and, keeping my fingers crossed, I was delighted to see that no-one else was bidding for it. With only twelve hours left of the auction I put in my bid, and I'm sure you can identify with my absolute joy and delight when I found out I was the only bidder and I had purchased this magnificent dining suite for just a fraction of its probable value.
Suite dreams indeed!
