Reviewed: Walnut Dining Table from Target

First of all, I just want to say that Super Tuesday is next week so go and VOTE…for Obama.

Secondly, the Walnut Table from Target is a pretty sweet deal. I don’t know how many of our readers are in the market for home furnishings, but if you are you’ll find out soon enough that things get expensive. Did you know that dressers not made from MDF are upwards of 1000 bucks? I’ve run the gamut of furniture shopping; Room & Board, Crate & Barrel, Target, JC Penney, craigslist (although, someone told me a bedbugs story the other day and it totally freaked me out), the flea market on the corner and Pottery Barn. The trick is doing a little something called “mixing hi and lo” (this term may seem too fancy for your blood, but just think about it and you'll understand.) Not everything in your apartment needs to be super quality, so save some money and find some low cost items that can be paired with something expensive to look chic.

Recently I purchased this stunning, elegant table for $99. It got to my house in, like, two days, and it only took me about an hour to assemble (good ol’ alan wrenches!) It’s the perfect size for our short-on-space apartment, since if you’ve ever shopped for dining room tables you’ll see that most of them are gigantic…and 1 out of 3 people on craigslist spell it ‘dinning’. This one is only 47X30, making it easy to seat 4 and maybe 6 in a pinch if you all bumped knees and elbows (nevermind, that is a terrible idea.)

The table is just as good as it looks in the picture—nice dark stain, real wood, smooth surface, sturdy and simple. So far the top seems to be pretty scratch-happy. Yesterday all I did was set my cereal bowl down and it looks like a tiger attacked (a miniature one, with tiny claws.) It's definitely not good because we’ve had the table for a week and are continuing to eat hunched over our coffee table, but then again big deal. I don't want to be one of those people who obsesses about the condition of my furniture--it's too easy to end up with a plastic-covered couch and tennis balls on the legs of the chairs. Speaking of chairs, we found two vintage ones at a shop down the street for $30, which I'm going to repaint and recover the seats, and then added two chairs from C&B and now I'm kind of proud of myself for putting together a dining set.

88 Stars. Convenience, price and style factors still outweigh functionality in this case. I can always invest in patriotic placemats and plastic-coated floral tablecloths.