The Big Oak Table (B.O.T. and pronounced BOAT for obvious reasons) was a great idea with poor foresight, and bad execution.
Lisa and I had the B.O.T. made for us in the fall of 2008. It was made by this older gentleman who built hand crafted oak furniture in his shop just north of Syracuse, NY. We met him - his name escapes me - at a craft fair the year before when we bought an oak side/buffet table. We loved and thought - "Hey, we have a small family now, but it's going to get bigger. Let's have a B-I-G table so we can have family, friends, and dinner parties!" We contacted the gentleman and laid our plan.
He build us 72" x 48" solid oak table with two addition 12" inserts for a whopping eight foot table! It was gorgeous construction with exceptional wood grain.
He delivered it to our tiny little house on Miller Street, carefully easing it on it's side through the door, and set it down in our dining room. To which Lisa promptly broke out in tears.
Lisa broke out into tears because A, the thing took up almost all of our dining room space; B, I was about two weeks away from deploying to Iraq; and C, she could not imagine herself sitting at this big, empty table with just herself and a toddler TJ. Literally and figuratively, this thing was a monster.
We lived across the street from a local furniture store. Great guys. They would plow our driveway from time to time in the winter and always gave us refrigerator boxes for TJ to make forts out of. I ran over to them and told them we had an "emergency". They quickly assessed the situation and within five minutes the table was out our house and in their warehouse.
And there it stayed for my deployment.
And my home coming.
And the move to Willow Spring, NC.
Where it lasted a year or so in the dining room; still a B.O.T. that really didn't belong. When the opportunity came to get Betty's dining room set when she moved from Florida to North Carolina the B.O.T. went back in to storage in our garage where it made a very useful place to put boxes for "the next garage sale".
At least two other times I tried to sell the BOT on Craigslist without a single bite. After our last garage sale (for a while) the table now just took up space in the garage so I gave Craigslist one more try.
I am happy to say that "Lisa-Recently-Moved-From-Chicago" and her daughter are now proud owners of the B.O.T. And you know what they say, "the two happiest days of a B.O.T. owners life are the day they buy and the day they sell it."
