Dining Tables & Dining Furniture: Putting the Pieces Together

Probably the easiest way to pick out what you want from your dining furniture is to look at it on a piece by piece basis. There are quite a few decisions that go into setting a good dining area, from what you can actually afford, always a key issue, to what you need your dining room to actually do.

This can easily get to be overwhelming, and it's the primary reason that a lot of people rush into the decision, which is true of almost all furniture purchases. The thing is, dining furniture is a long term purchase and one that deserves the same kind of care.

The odds are good that you're going to replace cars more often than your dining room furniture, so if you choose something that simply doesn't work in your home, you're either going to need to spend a good chunk of money to replace it or be faintly annoyed with it on a daily basis, neither of which is really a good thing.

So it's in the best interest of your wallet and your sanity to actually give some thought toward your dining furniture before you buy. The easiest way to do this is to build the set in your head, one piece at a time.

The obvious basic component of dining furniture is the table unless you're intending to eat off the floor. As some Asian cultures have shown, you can make do with a table and no chairs, but the reverse has never been popular.

Dining tables aside from being flat, can come in all shapes and sizes. They can range from small tables suitable for two, at best, to giant tables that you could successfully hold a banquet at. What you get is going to depend on what you need, what you can fit into room and what you can afford.

What you can afford is probably the simplest of these to figure out. You know how much you can afford, and you should buy the most table that you can afford. What you want to go for is quality, and if you skimp on the table, you will likely end up spending more money replacing it than you'll save being cheap.

What you can fit into your dining room or wherever you're actually going to be eating is a little trickier, simply because most people don't have much of a knack for looking at pictures or display models and then imagining how much space they take up. There is a simple answer to that, which is a tape measure.

The thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to allow space for the chairs as well as the table itself, and then space for the people, and then space to walk around those chairs. If you misjudge this, you're going to be constantly squeezing around the table, which will get old fast.

Need is something that varies immensely from person to person. If there are two people in your house and you don't anticipate hosting the inlaws, a small table is going to be just fine for your use. But if you've got a bunch of people in your family or you just like having people over for dinner, then you need a bigger table.

A good rule of thumb is to buy for the future. If you're planning on having kids, you should buy with that in mind, for instance. If you're not sure, bear in mind that extending dining tables are pretty common, and can be extremely handy for adapting to changing demands.

The other key component is, of course, the chairs. Mostly these are sold with the table, but you can also mix and match. What you really want to look at with chairs is durability and comfort. Your chairs are going to get used a lot harder than your table, and you don't want something that is going to half apart with use.

Once you've got your dining tables and chairs sorted out, you can branch out into other pieces of dining furniture and yes, there are other pieces. One of the most popular is the sideboard, which is used to serve food from and is part of a traditional formal dining set. Beyond that there are dinettes and cabinets and all sorts of things you can use to expand your dining options.