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After months of not using the cabin “properly” because all I had was a tiny wooden tv tray downstairs (so I spent most of my time up in the loft which is really only suitable for cozy lie-down tasks), I finally spotted the perfect table and bought it with a small portion of one generous philanthropist’s donation(s) to the cause:

Price of my new table for the cabin.

It looked pretty wrecked, but then the guy came out, said he hadn’t even washed it off yet . . . I scratched at a fault with my fingernail and it crumbled right off!

Dirty, DIRTY table!! Goooood Girl, table . . .

So I bought it. I’d been lazily keeping my eye open for a desk or table that would fit, be serviceable and feel lovely but it took all these months to drive by the perfect table sitting on a sidewalk for sale. I couldn’t have found it on purpose or known this was exactly what I wanted. And I wouldn’t have wanted a new, reproduction version of this table.

Delia and I brought it to the cabin, inserted it into place, and I cleaned it. Almost all of this rusty stain disappeared:

I'll bet I can clean this off completely with vinegar & elbow grease.

The white apron around the edge of the table won’t ever be close to pristine, but Delia told me to rub the rusty legs with aluminum foil and they’ll get better:

Contrast rusty pole on left w/ shiny pole on right (scrubbed with foil).

I haven’t scrubbed much more than that, but I have spent a few good hours sitting at the table since then, feeling it’s perfectly faded and mildly scratched smooth cool top.

I think it’s pretty hard to find a formica table with chrome AND a leaf AND with the gingham top. The ones I see online with a gingham pattern all have wooden legs (and definitely no leaf). Not that I care about making great antiquing finds, but I do like to know a little about my tools and things I like. For all I know this IS a reproduction, but an older one than the styles they make now. Definitely leave comments if you know more about these tables or have some memories of these kinds of tables you feel like sharing. We could stuff a whole little family into the cabin for Thanksgiving dinner or Chinese takeout or something!

Look at my table leaf (& me in my shiny kettle)!

‘Tis clean! But still so touched and used.

Look at how clean my new old table is now!

Right now I’m doing a bunch of time-consuming windows updates on the laptop so that I can install windows live writer as an offline blog editor, but now I’m not so sure I want to do that. Really I just want to get over there to the cabin RIGHT NOW and sit at my table.

Stay tuned for more rhapsodizing about My Perfect Table (and all of the things it is perfect FOR).