Our Table

Okay class, it's storytime!!

(Haha! Just kidding. About the class part. Not the story part.)

So pretty much everyone who knows Jon and me knows that we attended (and loved) Harding University. We started dating in September of senior year. I graduated in May and that fall I moved back to Searcy to live with 2 girlfriends and be closer to Jon.

My friends and I shared a 3 bedroom apartment, and we all contributed to try to furnish the thing...which to 3 broke college girls was HUGE! The last thing we needed was a dining room table, and even the cheapo sets at the big box stores were at least a few hundred dollars! No way was that happening!

One Saturday afternoon Jon and I decided to go out to the flea market. In the country. In Arkansas. Nothing else like it...anywhere! We had wandered around nearly the whole place and didn't see a table that was worth much of anything, until the very end.

Jon spotted it. "It" was an old solid oak table, buried under a daunting load of ridiculous old collectible (to some, maybe!) junk. It was dirty and beat up, but it was a table. A solid, wooden table. And it was $50.

"Don't worry," Jon said. "We'll fix it up! We can sand it down and stain it. When we put a nice coat of polyurethane on it'll look good as new!" (We have a long, long history of having high hopes when it comes to getting big projects done in a respectable amount of time!)

That December we went to Michigan for Christmas break. Jon proposed! Now the table that I had bought for my apartment was now going to be "our" table! It was such an exciting time!

For Valentine's Day, he gave me this....
Inside it had coupons for offers like this...

And this...

And this...

and this...

One of my most favorite coupons was this one, because, well, what girl wouldn't want a coupon like this:
But it also had this one:
He really did have good intentions and high hopes to help me finish out my table! On our honeymoon we actually spent a lot of our time shopping in Amish woodshops for handmade wooden chairs go with our table and make a set. It was our wedding gift to each other.

One Saturday morning he acutally got started by getting out the sander and cleaning up the top. (He also didn't think about actually moving the table outside so the sawdust wouldn't get on everything else in the dining room, but, o-well!)
But then this happened...

And this happened too....and who can keep a poor, old, dirty, unfinished table clean under these circumstances??

But did we let it get us down? No sir-ee!! Because we stick to our goals! This summer, almost eight years since I first bought the table, I made good on that coupon and we got-er-done!

We spent a couple days sanding it down, then started putting coats of stain on it...

And I may just be a silly girl, but now, whenever I walk through my dining room I just glance over and my heart pours over with pride. Not just because now it's a beautifully finished oak table.

There's so much more to that table. It has a story--it's part of our history. It's been with us from the beginning. It was gross and dirty and ugly, but now it's just lovely.

It's not just any table. It's our table.