Mini Kitchen Makeover: I Sort of Hate the Word Greige

 

At some point over the past couple of weeks of doing this mini kitchen update (I'm hoping for a bigger kitchen update sometime soon, as discussed here) I realized that my kitchen could now be a museum exhibit from the future: "Typical Blogger's House, c. 2013." Granite countertops. Farmhouse table. Chalkboard Wall. And now....greige walls. Benjamin Moore's Revere Pewter, specifically.

I didn't mean to paint the walls Revere Pewter. I was resistant because everyone talks about how awesome it is, and I didn't want to do the same thing as everyone.

Also, apparently, I really wanted a paint color that was named after an animal, because I went to Benjamin Moore and came back with samples of Gray Horse and Gray Owl:

That's Gray Owl on the left, and Gray Horse on the right. I liked them both, but neither of them was really right for this room.

The kitchen is one of the rooms that had been updated by the former owners. The cabinets and counter tops and backsplash are all newer, good quality stuff. But not what I would have picked and kind of limiting in some ways. The cabinets are a light colored, sort of orangey wood. The granite is gray-brown speckly. The backsplash is, I believe, tumbled marble--really nice and really....tan.

I've had a really hard time picking a color for this room. I've been gravitating toward cooler colors, lots of blues, for most of the house, but that just wasn't going to work in here. So I liked Gray Owl, but it was too silvery and cool to go with the tile and counter tops in the kitchen. Gray Horse was closer, but it was a little dark and looked too green in some light.

The worst thing about Benjamin Moore is that they don't sell a true sample size of paint. You have to buy a pint, and they cost something like $8. This can add up very quickly when you have no idea what paint color you want.

So after those two didn't work out, I just went all in and bought a whole gallon of Revere Pewter. I had been looking at it online in 100 different rooms for pretty much a full year, after all, so I figured I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

And.....

Well. You know how sometimes after you've painted a room, every time you walk into that room you're struck by how different and awesome it looks? Yeah. That didn't happen. It went from a  neutral yellow to a  neutral beige-y gray.

Which is not to say I'm unhappy with it. I think it's exactly what the kitchen demanded. The main thing Revere Pewter has going for it is that it's truly, truly neutral. It has no blue or pink or green undertones like a lot of grays and beiges and taupes do. It is all tan and gray. And it's very pleasant. It's just hard to get excited about it. I know some people manage to, based on all of the glowing Revere Pewter reviews online. I'm just not a very....neutral person.

One thing I'll give it--I totally and completely understand why someone had to invent the word greige now. As soon as it went up, I was all, "it's gray! no, it's beige! gray! beige!" It's pretty much impossible to decide. As near as I can figure, it looks more gray the more natural light is hitting it.

So here it is:

I took it from this angle so you can see the granite and cabinets in the same shot with the walls.

And here's the other side of the kitchen, as clean as it ever gets!

So there you can see it right up against the cabinets on that one wall on the far left, and also next to the backsplash. I think this is a good representation, too, of how it looks much beiger without natural light. This half of the kitchen only has that one window that goes into the sunroom; it's very dark without the overhead lights on. The other half has the big bay window to gray things up. Although the bay window goes to the screen porch, so still not as bright as it could be. And as it WILL be if I get my wish to knock the wall out there. I guess I should mention that the gray side of Revere Pewter is my favorite side, so I'm hoping to bring it out more by bringing in more natural light. Someday.

Oh, one more thing re: paint. I sent Dave out to buy the paint, and he had to go to not our regular Benjamin Moore store, because that one's closed on Sundays. I told him I usually ask for the "middle" quality paint. So when he came back with this "Regal" paint that cost nearly $50 (!), I thought he'd totally been scammed. We usually pay more like $35. But I have to say--that paint? was incredible. We didn't prime, just slapped a coat on there, and there was no question that one coat was plenty. This never happens to us. We always have to at least go back over big portions with a second coat, even if we don't redo the whole thing. Also, we barely touched the gallon, between the amazing coverage and how most of the kitchen is cabinets and windows and such. I think I could paint my whole house with the rest of the gallon. Not really. But definitely my den. And I just might.

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The Illustrated Kitchen Wall

Are you ready for this? I'm about to BLOW.YOUR.MIND.

There is this paint that you can buy that turns any surface in  your house into a CHALKBOARD. 

True story.

Okay. I suppose at this point talking about how overdone chalkboard walls are is pretty much as overdone as chalkboard walls themselves.

But what about talking about talking about how overdone chalkboard walls are?!

See? Right? I just blew your mind, didn't I?

So I mentioned wanting to make a chalkboard wall in this awkward little corner of the kitchen back in the plans/goals post at the end of last year:

Maybe now you're all, "hey! you were just talking about wanting to move that refrigerator! So why are you wasting all this time chalkboard walling?! Huh? Why?"  Well. When that happens I think we will keep the lovely chalkboard wall and frame it out somehow. With wood. It will be nice.

I used Rustoleum chalkboard paint. I primed it and then put on five coats (yes! five!) and it still only took around half the quart.

One coat in, it looked like this:

It took a couple of days because each coat was supposed to dry for four hours before recoating. I used a little smooth roller and kept it in the fridge, wrapped in plastic wrap, between coats:

After the fifth coat, we let it set for 4 days, because this is what Rustoleum told us to do. Then we primed it by covering it with chalk and wiping it off, because this is what all the other blogs told us to do:

Then I referenced art and took pictures:

The kids descended on it immediately:

Within an hour it looked like this:

And within a day it looked like this:

So that's kind of fun. Then yesterday we had a three year old over, so I went to erase everything so he could draw on it, and realized from the kids' (mostly Gus and Ari) angry protests, that they wanted to keep the wall just how it was FOREVER. I felt this was impractical and silly. So we're still negotiating on this point.

Here's what the awkward corner looks like now:

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Farmhouse Table: Easy, One Month Long Project

That's a joke up there. It shouldn't really take you a month to make a farmhouse table. And, if you are not us, it probably won't!

It's kitchen week here at Boxy Colonial. Or maybe kitchen fortnight. We've got a good bit going on in the kitchen, and I'm going to tell you all about it. Slowly. I'm going to get two whole posts out of this little table. This only makes sense after how long it took us to finish it, right?

This is the general table show off post, with a bit of background information, lots of pictures, and also the stuff about the stain and finish on it. Then Dave will write up the post about the actual table construction with a cut list and all that.

We moved our old kitchen table out to the sunroom awhile back. This was awesome for the sunroom, but left us tableless in the kitchen, which meant that not only was there nowhere to sit or eat in the kitchen, but people kept hitting their heads on the light fixture in there, what with no table to keep them from walking under it. And the light fixture happens to be very pointy.

So Dave decided to make a table (really, we knew for months that Dave was going to make a table. It didn't take getting stabbed in the head by the light fixture to remind us that we needed a kitchen table. I just told the story that way for dramatic effect).

We looked at maybe....783?....blog posts about other people's farmhouse tables, mostly riffs on Ana White plans, and then Dave came up with his version, scaled down for our kitchen. Eventually, I told him to stop trying to get me to help him decide about all the little details involving tools and wood and such, and that he should just surprise me.

And then the table looked like complete crap when he finished.

JUST KIDDING! It looks great! I love it! Dave is such a good decider!

He's going to tell you about all of that later....how we (he) decided on the size and what wood to use and how it went together. I will show you the table. And then I will tell you about the stain. Because that was my part.

My original plan, way back a long time ago, was to just ignore all the light wood in the kitchen and stain the table dark walnut. I didn't want to give it a light stain like the cabinets or the floor; I didn't want to let the cabinets and floor bully me into a finish I didn't like. But then it occurred to me that a grayish finish would work well with all the gray in our granite countertops. And I LIKE gray!

I didn't want straight up gray like we used on our foyer bench, though. I did a lot of reading and found many complicated sounding plans for homemade stain involving rusty nails and tea and eye of newt and hair from a unicorn's tail and all that sort of thing.

And then! Right before I left to hunt unicorns, Katja at Shift Ctrl Art posted about how she made a lovely barnwood colored stain by.....mixing two different colors of stain together! Brilliant! Easy! My kind of custom stain:

Custom Barnwood Stain at Shift Ctrl Art

See how I snuck in the shot that not only shows off the color, but also the lovely table setting?

My stain is not the same color because I decided to just work with the stains I already had on hand. 

I had a big thing of Cabot gray semi-transparent deck stain that my friend Kristi gave me, and I had my beloved dark walnut. All I did was pour a bunch of the gray stain into a yogurt container then slowly mix in the dark walnut, just a little bit at a time, testing it out on some scrap wood after every addition, until I got it how I wanted it. 

Then I brushed it on to the table (I did the stain back before the table was assembled, to make it a little easier), let it soak in for 20 minutes or so, and wiped it off with a rag. 

After that, we did a gazillion coats of polyurethane. Well. We did two coats on the legs and apron and four or five on the top. We went with the semi-gloss, but now I'm kind of wishing we'd gone with satin. But maybe the gloss will simmer down over time. And, anyway, water beads right up on that thing now! 

So maybe you noticed that there is a motley collection of random chairs around the table right now. Those are not staying. I am slowly collecting the permanent chairs now, and then I will do something FUN with them. And colorful. Because my kitchen is looking pretty monochromatic these days. That one brown windsor chair, with the funny part in the middle? That's the first one I've found for the table. It took about 5 thrift store trips to find the one, and I need six. Sigh.

I have TWO MORE exciting kitchen projects to share soon. And a smaller sunroom post. Also my last Disney post. SO MUCH POSTING!

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Imaginary Kitchen

I have been holding out on you guys. I know I've been all, "I bought a chair. Disney. Sharpie octopus." ....after promising BIG SUMMER PROJECTS.

Part of the reason for this is that summer always sort of becomes its own project. And, you know, you have to let summer do that, because it only happens once a year.

But ALSO, we have been working on a biggish project, only (see previous paragraph) it's taking way longer than we expected, so I haven't been able to post about it yet. Furthermore, I'm not sure when I WILL post about it, because I'd like to finish a couple of smaller, related projects first so as to reveal the whole glorious thing at once.

In the meantime, I bet there's something else around here that I can draw on with a Sharpie!

Just kidding.

Hoping the big project will be ready to post about next week. And I have some catching up on other things to do before that. Like I believe I promised two more posts about future house plans (upstairs and outside/basement) way back a long time ago. And we snuck in a small trip when my mother in law was visiting that I'll post about. And Abe is SIX MONTHS OLD today (!) so there's that.

And today! Today I have for you a post about what I want to do with my kitchen. Someday. Maybe soonish, depending on how much it will cost. By soonish, I could mean this year, but I probably mean next year.

Here's what I said about my kitchen back when I actually posted the first part of the Big House List:

Scenario one (unrealistic, maybe someday scenario)

*move refrigerator to another wall to make room for a big island with seating

*open up doorway wider between dining room and kitchen

*built in storage along wall where table is now?

*all of this moving appliances about would necessitate new counters

I have thought about it more since then.

Our house is plenty big, but the kitchen itself is fairly small for a house this size, and it's not laid out particularly well.

I've mentioned that my house is kind of boxy, right? Oh, wait, it's right up there in the blog title!

Okay, so the kitchen opens up to the dining room, and the center hall, and the sunroom, but it doesn't really open up to any of them.  As we established back when we built our baby/dog gate, the doorway to the sunroom is so narrow that baby gate makers don't even acknowledge the existence of doorways its size.

The eat in area is relatively narrow.

And then there's the way the refrigerator is randomly jutting out of one wall, all by itself, totally interrupting the flow to the hallway AND making things a little cramped if more than one person is trying to use the island.

To top all of this off, I've become increasingly jealous lately of people with big islands they can put stools around. Largely because of all the pretty stools out there. Like these:

overstock.com

When we first moved in, these problems seemed like ones we'd probably just need to live with, at least for a long while. But the nice thing about not touching your kitchen at all for over a year is that you start to formulate some ideas for ways to make it more functional that never occurred to you early on. 

That plan up there was the start of it....I've become a little obsessed with getting that refrigerator off of it's weird lonely wall. But then! The inspiration! It struck!

So I knew that the refrigerator was my big problem. It needed to move. But where? Well, the place where we have lots of wall space is over here:

...uhh, it's harder to tell than I thought. This is the view from the dining room. The cabinet thing you see sticking out on the right is a built in pantry type thing. And then the big wall I mean is also on the right, by the bay window. That's the only big wall that's not occupied by appliances and counters. 

Okay, so, the refrigerator could go there. Here is where the refrigerator is right now:

See what I mean? It's just sticking out there being a pain in the butt, making an awkward little passageway into the hallway, and making it impossible for me to have a big, glorious island with pretty stools around it.

(I tried, and tried, and TRIED to find a picture to put here of an island like I want. But all I could find were unattributed or spammy seeming links. Google has failed me).

So if the fridge is gone, I can put in a big island with pretty stools! I'm thinking a fun color for said island and solid colored quartz or granite to coordinate with but not match that speckly granite we have now. In my fantasy kitchen all my appliances will be new and will match, of course. Also, my kitchen will be clean.

So now I have a big ol' island with pretty stools (so I no longer need a table in the kitchen, which is good, because I don't have room for it with my big island) and my refrigerator is hanging out over against the wall, looking weird all alone and next to the bay window, right?

No!

Because (here is where the inspiration comes in).....I want to knock that bay window out and push out the wall!

It's all PERFECT, don't you see?! Look:

(Ignore doggy paw prints on window; there will be a dog door in my fantasy kitchen, so Fiesta won't have to scratch there to get back in).

I want to push the wall out where that porch railing is now and put in two big windows. That will open that tiny little doorway WAY up to the sunroom, bringing those spaces together. And then the door out to the deck will be on the right there.

And right next to the door, on the big wall?

Will be not only my fridge but a big wall of floor to ceiling built in storage! 

Kind of like this. Only with a refrigerator:

Garden Web

I'm very excited about my imaginary kitchen. We've already had someone out to give us an idea of how feasible my big plan is (along with how much it will cost to keep our sunroom windows from just falling out of  the house one day, which is more pressing). But we haven't heard back yet, so we have no idea what the money will look like and, therefore, no idea whether we'll be 80 before we can make it a reality. But we'll see. And I'm having fun imagining it in the meantime.

DIY Baby and Dog Gate Instructions

Special guest blogger today! Dave! The baby gate he made a few months ago is one of my most viewed and most pinned posts. Sadly, when people view it, they see some cruddy pictures of the gate and....no real information about how to make it. We've been meaning to get the how to make it post up for forever now. The other day someone finally commented on the post to ASK how to make it, and that was, it turns out, just the motivation Dave needed to make some pretty diagrams and write it up. So here you go!

Many moons ago, Gretchen posted about a baby gate that I made to keep dogs (mostly Gable) out of the kitchen.  You can read about it here.

Every couple weeks, she asks me when I'm going to write out the instructions on how I built it.  But because I never really considered it complete, and because I'm a big procrastinator, it hasn't gotten done until now.  It's been 95% complete since October, but the hook and eye latch we bought to keep it locked never really worked.  Any toddler would be able to shake the gate with his tiny fists and pop the hook out of the eye.  For that matter, any moderately curious or determined dog could do the same.  Fiesta the Beagle is one such dog.  Fortunately, Gable the Dopey is not.  While he's a big enough problem dog to require us to build a specialty gate to keep him out of the kitchen, he's a dog of routine and appreciates having his own sun room retreat during eating times.  But with a new baby in the house, I knew we would need something a little more secure in the future, so I finally found a suitable latching device.  So now I can explain the whole process.  Lucky you!

So the reason we needed a custom-built gate is because the doorway is crazy narrow, specifically 26.25 inches.  It was formerly part of the kitchen bay window, but was opened up to a do-it-yourself addition of a sunroom by some previous owner.  Since no commercially available gates come in sizes so tiny, I set to work on plans of my own.  The Home Depot had these super cheap untreated 2x2 pine posts - so I bought enough of these to make the following gate:

So in case you don't know, lumber measurements don't actually match their name.  If you buy a 2x2 post, you'd think that you're getting 2 inch by 2 inch posts.  Nope.  It's actually 1.5 inch by 1.5 inch posts.  That means that the skinny dimension of each of those rectangles is 1.5 inches, in case you're keeping track.

The vertical dark gray 2x2s are 35 inches long.  This is the height of the gate and is completely customize-able.  I think I picked that height because it meant I had minimal leftover wood.  It's pretty tall for a gate, but Gable is a pretty big dog, so it works out.  The horizontal light grays are 22.25 inches long.  Add the 1.5 inches on each side for the vertical posts and you get a total gate width of 25.25 inches.  "But Dave, you said the doorway is 26.25 inches wide.  Why is the gate 1 inch too narrow?"  More on that in a moment.  Since the vertical brown 2x2s are contained within the horizontal posts, they needed to be 3 inches shorter than the exterior vertical dark grays, so they come in at 32 inches a piece.

After careful measuring, remeasuring, conferring with Gretchen, and measuring again, I sliced up the posts using the Skil saw and sanded all the pieces with the power sander.  I used fourteen 2-inch deck screws to attach all the pieces together.  I was either smart enough or made enough mistakes in the past to know that if predrilling was important to avoid splitting such narrow pieces of wood.  So each light gray post got five screw holes and each dark gray post got two.  If I were smarter or had made more mistakes in the past, I would have used wood glue as well.  While the screws were holding the posts in place, they made for a nice point of rotation for each of the brown posts.  Instead of taking everything apart to add the glue, I decided to use some finishing nails hammered at 45 degrees to create more points of connection between the light gray and brown.  While that worked OK, the hammering jarred the alignment off on some of the posts.  So you can feel the not-flush adjoining on some of the posts.  It bothers me literally every day of my life.

Now that the gate was complete, I had to attach it to the doorway.  I didn't want the hinge screws to go directly into the drywall (there is no wooden door frame as there was never a door there) because I didn't think that would hold the test of time and dogs and boys.  So instead, I used some more wood - this time 1x2 (so in actuality 0.75 inches by 1.5 inches) - cut to the length of the gate height.  More predrilling and deck screws attaching this new piece to the exact middle of the 6 inch wide drywall, and I was ready to attach the two hinges into nice sturdy wood.  This is, by the way, where the extra 1 inch of width came from.  The 0.75 for the wood, and the rest for the hinges and for a little leeway on the other side of the gate.

Speaking of the other side of the gate, there needed to be some sort of door stop to prevent the gate from getting pulled past where the hinges and hinge screws wanted to go.  So I used another 1x2 board and attached it to the other side of the doorway.  This time, it wasn't exactly in the middle because I wanted to allow the gate to close flush with the first 1x2.  Maybe this diagram can explain better than words.

This is an areal view - the light and dark grays are the top of the gate (color coded!) and the green and purple pieces are the hinge board and the door stop respectively.  While the first diagram is to scale, I had to shorten the width of the gate in this one in order to show the relevant details without making a crazy long image.  If this diagram really were to scale, the doorway would be a little more than one foot wide, which is just crazy.  In real life, the doorway is a little more than TWO feet wide.

So all of this worked great, except for the previously mentioned battle with the hook and eye.  We tried various configurations and angles to try to make it more secure without much success.  It got to the point where the hole the hook screwed into was so stripped that we would routinely find the hook lying somewhere on the floor.  In fact, I looked for the hook just today and was unable to find it.  What good timing that I finally bought a latch that will work!

Old system:

The new latch:

The new latch installed!

This should work great for two significant reasons.  One, the "hook" part goes deep into the "eye" part, so it won't jiggle out with excessive toddler fists or beagle paws.  Two, each piece is attached by four screws into wood (the gate for the hook, the doorstop for the eye).  This should really stay put.  Oh, it's worth noting that my previously mentioned smarts and/or experience took a hiatus when I screwed this latch into place.  I did not predrill screw holes and there are now small cracks in the wood that I hope will stay small.  This will likely bother me literally every single day for many years to come ... or until the gate breaks.

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Flashback!

I think we've already done more with this house in 4 months than we did with our old house in 9 years. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it does make me sad to look back at all the stuff we did in the last few months, to get the house ready to sell, and wonder why we didn't do it earlier so we could enjoy it.  I can't pin down exactly the reason for our house-decorating/fixing-up lethargy, but I do have my suspicions, and their names are Ari, Milo, and August.

When we moved in, we had an almost 2 year old, and I was 7 months pregnant. Then we had August 2 1/2 years after Milo, and, well...things stayed pretty hectic for a long time. Of course, I seem to be reverting to old patterns with this whole having another baby thing I'm doing (and that's part of the reason I feel such a push to get things done over the next couple of months, while there's still time!)....but we have no plans to repeat having a baby and a toddler at the same time.

One of the saddest parts of leaving our old house was how little time we had to enjoy the kitchen reno we did in order to hurry along the house selling. In fact, I wouldn't say we got to enjoy it at all;  it was nice to look at, but I too scared of messing it up to actually USE the kitchen much.

So let's take a moment to look back on it and pretend it was ever really ours (good thing I took pictures, since otherwise I'd have go pound on the new owner's door and ask to come in and visit for awhile).

I don't really have bonafide "before" shots, so here's what I managed to come up with:

This is the color the kitchen came with, and we lived with it for a very long time. Why is every house I move into yellow? That's our old table, and those are the same plates I bought at Marshall's or TJ Maxx or somewhere back when we lived in Boston. Then I held on to them until their time was past and they'd lost pretty much all resale value. Oh well.

And this is the best I could do to show the lovely builder grade oak cabinets, brass hardware, and original, late '80's laminate (complete with chipped off piece on the corner there). Ignore the counter surface in the middle there; that was our stand-alone island (essential for our almost no counter space kitchen). We had repainted by this point, but hadn't gotten any further than that, despite grand plans.

We had no funds for granite or new cabinets or to hire anyone to refinish the cabinets. So one week Dave took the kids to California to visit in-laws, and I stayed behind and did a quick, cheap remodel. We had butcher block from Ikea installed, and my wonderful real estate agent and some equally wonderful friends came over to help me knock out painting the cabinets and replacing all the hardware. Then Dave put up the backsplash when he got home. Finished result:

Oh, how I love that backsplash! It's plastic, but it looks like pressed tin.

I loved these counter tops, but I was terrified of using them. I spent most of my time rubbing mineral oil into them and watching them obsessively to make sure I cleaned up any drop of water immediately.

The new table was really supposed to wait and go straight to the new house, but the old table was so beat up that we went ahead and got it early.

I don't have a price breakdown....the cabinets were maybe $60 for hardware (I reused the hinges and spray painted them to match the brushed nickel cabinet pulls) plus the rest of the same never-ending gallon of paint I had already painted every bathroom cabinet in the house with (and some oil based primer that I also already had on hand). I want to say we bought two 96" lengths of the Numerar counters from Ikea for $170 each. Having the countertops installed was the most expensive part, at around $500, if I remember right. Of course, handier people than we could have done that themselves. We could not. I'm glad we didn't try.

From time to time I wonder if I would have done things the same way if were doing it for ourselves. I think we mostly would have. I had actually envisioned painting the cabinets black long before we decided we were moving, in fact. And I've already shared my love of the backsplash. It's possible I would have sprung for real tin had we been staying, but it's also possible I would have decided that the extra cost + extra maintenance would have made it not worthwhile.

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.....