What Ana Does

I have been casually looking at dining room chairs for months. And months. But not getting serious -- just gathering ideas of what is available and to my taste. And prices. I knew I wanted more stylish, less used-by-children, and more comfortable chairs so diners didn't feel like they were sitting on a block of granite for the meal.  I was DONE putting it off, once I decided to repaint the walls, I added new chairs to the plan. So I sat myself down (on the hard dining room chairs, ugh) and made some hard decisions.  First,  I decided to stop worrying about the chairs matching the dining room table. It's an 8 ft warm/greyish wood tone table -- as was the popular style 10ish years ago -- we bought at Restoration Outlet for a steal. To try to match the wood stain, even new Restoration chairs, would never work. It's aged. It's seen lots of sunlight on it. I'm sure it's a different color.  And who cares?! I looked through Pinterest and thought the matchy-matchy set...

One of the last shopping items on my list was to find matching chairs for the kitchen table. My first idea was to find thrifted chairs and paint them all black. I've seen the look on Pinterest many times and it's awesome.  But after digging through all the online shops and striking out at the ReStore (twice), I found black metal chairs that matched the white metal stools at the island. Great idea, right? And the price was less than most of the chairs I was looking at.  (Here's the Wayfair link to the black metal chairs I bought.) Notice that I have two matching light-wood chairs we bought from Crate & Barrel back when Leah was born -- 16 years ago! -- and are no longer sold by that company, unfortunately.  The matching black matches the light fixtures all over the kitchen. And they're more comfortable than you'd think.  And last ... here's the kitchen table area with the finished floors. They're almost a light blonde and giving some Scandi vibes and I LO...