Making the Cut: Bench and Kids Table
Making the Cut is a series on the smart and simple solutions that have (or have not) earned a place in our home.
Executive summary: I was always nervous about the placement of my favorite bench in the hallway, but now I’ve finally figured out a better place for it, and solved another “problem” in the process.
Nobody’s perfect. And no (minimalist) design is perfect. I had mentioned in my home tour (see the main living space here) that the kids table and chairs is mostly a prop. My son has now sat here twice (up from once!) in the >2.5 years we’ve had this set. Can you believe that someone as obsessed as I am over making every inch of our small space count would allow these 8 square feet to be underutilized?? That’s 1% of our entire home, not pulling its weight! Preposterous!
The side of our main living space containing the hardly ever used kids table and chairs.
Well, you know how sometimes a problem nags at you in the back of your mind but you lack the will to immediately do something about it? It takes a shove to break free of the inertia and jump into action. In this case, it took a stumble to fall into action, with my newly-minted toddler tripping and banging her head on my favorite wooden bench in the hallway. I’ll explain how this ties together:
My favorite bench (see it in the entryway tour here) needed a home in this apartment, and I couldn’t figure out the right place for it. I’d originally acquired it to go at the foot of our bed, when we were rolling in excess space in our 1,000-square foot townhome (only said slightly sarcastically). But with the layout in this apartment, it didn’t make sense at the foot of our bed anymore. But it’s just about the perfect length and depth to tuck under the counter in the hallway, so it became an extra (if not strictly necessary) surface to drop stuff on as we’re coming in and out of our home. The only problem is that I’d cringe every time my new walker raced past the bench, careening around tight turns as fast as her wobbly legs would take her, and I imagined her falling and taking out an eye on those unforgiving wooden corners. Could I have gotten corner protectors? I suppose, but I’m going to admit to vanity here and declare that my home is off limits at the moment to those hideous pieces of foam. We had no incidents for months, not even close calls, and we’d be extra careful whenever she ventured close to the bench. And then one day she slipped through my fingers when she stumbled in the vicinity of the bench, and she ended up with a red line across her eyebrow where she made contact with the edge. Cue the crying, if only for a minute. It was a small bump, no skin broken, not even a sign of the collision to be found on her face the next morning. But it sent me into a tiny rage (mostly at myself), and for a hot second, I considered “making the cut” and bidding the bench adieu. It hurt my child, it has to go! That feeling warred with my liking for the bench and not actually wanting to part with it. What’s the answer here?
Wow, this explanation is more long-winded than I had intended. But the gist is that I started to think about where else the bench could go, what else it could replace. The answer: it would become the kids table, which occupies a location that does not make my heart lurch when my toddler whizzes past. I have no attachment to the actual kids table, and the bench has the advantage of being narrower, so it opens up our living space even more (not to mention we’ve reclaimed the space under the counter where it used to live). Now the question is what to do with the white kids table. The solution I came up with is to disassemble it and keep the flat top to use as a portable surface to assemble jigsaw puzzles (or anything!) on. It’s nice for my son to be able to leave a puzzle (or block structure, or whatever he’s working on) partially done and out of the hands of his sister Todzilla for a few days. The top is easy to slide under a sofa or bed with all the puzzle pieces on it. The detached base and legs get stored in a closet for now, in case we want to reassemble the table in a new home someday, or donate a complete table when my son outgrows his puzzle phase. That sounds completely anti-minimalist of me, but in this case, I’ll side with “waste not, want not.”
Our bench is now the kids table, and the actual kids table has been transformed into a portable jigsaw puzzle/toy assembly surface for my 4-year old’s newest hobby.
I realize that I didn’t fully solve the problem I laid out at the beginning of this post: making those 8-square feet functional in our living space. My kids don’t use this bench table any more than the old one, but I will argue that at least now the bench has a place to live, no longer gives me heart palpitations, and can be a kids table when the mood strikes. It’s also possible that with its narrower profile, it now only occupies 7 square feet? And we unintentionally solved another “problem” in the process, namely, how to indulge my preschooler’s penchant for puzzles without giving up all our counters. That’s good enough for now.
Update Spring 2024: The kids do use this bench as a table now! Every day in fact. I (and these 7 square feet) am redeemed.