Jess's fab pictures below got me thinking about my cluttered mess of a house. One of the many things that makes her's look so big is the lack of a coffee table. Interesting.
Now that the boys are starting to walk, we don't have as much room for them to move around as I'd like. (Playing in another room or the basement isn't really an option.) A huge chunk of real estate in our family room is taken up by our massive coffee table.
It's your classic "stores a bunch of useless crap above and below that we haven't touched in years". I do eat at it during non-table dinner nights, but most of the time it's just used to house magazines and junk that needs to be covered up by a blanket so the babies don't tear it apart.
So, does anyone not have a coffee table? Do you miss it? Where do you put your feet? Maybe the next time DH goes to the lake, I'll just get rid of it and see if he notices?
Re: Can we live without a coffee table?
Married the love of my life 6/3/06
Became a family of three 8/25/09
We obviously don't have one. We do have a small ottoman that we used to put by the couch in the evenings to put our feet on (just one of those cube ones -- we'd move it to a corner during the day).
Back in the day I had one at the house I rented and it was just a crap collector. Old mail, magazines, receipts and just general clutter got thrown there.
Could you do something that's more like an ottoman? Then it might not become such a storage spot, and could be moved out of the way when needed or used as extra seating.
We have one that's just a bit shorter than the length of our couch. It's stays empty with the occasional exception of my laptop, and is helpful for setting sippy cups for B or my dinner on in the evening when it's just us hanging in the living room.
Here's a very old picture:
We got rid of ours after E started crawling because it was metal. We haven't missed it at all upstairs, and it makes a lot more room for E to run around and play. We did put it downstairs when we finished that area, but there's more room down there, so it doesn't seem to be in the way as much.
We have a good size ottoman that we use upstairs to put our feet on.
We had one in our appartment but have never used one in this house and haven't missed it. We have so much clutter to fight as it is that if we had a table we would never win the battle.
That and there is just absolutely no way it would fit, even a super skinny one would be too big for this house and the walkthrough arrangement of the bottom floor.
thanks to jennied
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