Kitchen musings

This is what the breakfast area in our kitchen looks like right now:

The table and chairs were a $45 Craigslist find that we picked up back when we were listing the old house and needed the dining room to look like a dining room. And I like it a lot, and most people probably don't even notice that a certain pesky little hound dog chewed up the leg of one of the chairs, but it only has 4 chairs. And we have 5, soon to be 6, people in our family who need somewhere to sit.

So what I'd like to do is move that table out to the sunroom and get a new table, big enough for all, for the kitchen. I guess another picture would be in order here, but I didn't take one, so I'll just do my best to explain: the breakfast area is pretty small. Narrow, in particular. The kitchen island across from this table juts out in a kind of weird way and invades the eating space. I imagine whoever did this did it so that the work area in the kitchen would be more spacious and, as the former occupant of a very cramped kitchen, I get this....but it makes our table big enough for six hunt a little challenging.

The long and short of it (pun intended) is that we need a long, skinny table. Current table is only a bit over 30 inches wide; I'm thinking we could go up to 36 or so without being driven insane, but more like 34 would be ideal. Ikea has some possibilities, like the Ingatorp:

...which is 34 1/4" wide and between 61 and 84" long, depending on whether you use the leaf or not. But it's also $329, and not real wood, and looks kind of awkward with the leaf out.

Then I remembered the rustic farmhouse table on Ana White's site: http://ana-white.com/2012/02/farmhouse-table ....also, I remembered how I've been meaning to get Dave to give building something from Ana White's site a try. I can help.

I'm also a little fixated on the tolix chairs that one sees many places these days. Oh, look, here I can get a set of 4 for the low, low price of $1080.99 at Lamps Plus!

Sadly, I do not have $1080.99 to spend on chairs. I had more or less given up hope of ever finding any for a price I could afford, when, suddenly, they started popping out of the woodwork right and left. First I found these $99 beauties from World Market:

And THEN, just as I was about to pull the trigger and go for them, I came across these on Overstock.com:

$179 for 4! I wish they came in unfinished steel like the World Market ones, but for less than half the price I'll deal (and probably spray paint them some other color. Like kelly green. I'm kind of fixated on kelly green these days, too). 

So that's my plan at the moment. Dave makes me a table and a bench (I didn't mention the bench, did I? I think I mentioned it to Dave anyway. Bench on one side, which I like the idea of and which also means I don't have to deal with how I have to order 8 chairs to get the 6 I need). And then fun metal chairs. Whoo hoo. Now, the only issue that remains is finding the time to build a table, ideally before Thanksgiving.....