This is SVALA.
$39.99 from IKEA.
Main parts: Solid birch, Solid alder.
2 chairs and 1 table included.
Can be painted or stained.
R and I picked up one of these things when C was a toddler. We liked the simplicity, the affordability, the kid-sizedness of it. We brought it home, set it up in the family room, and proceeded to have a years-long, half-hearted discussion about staining it to match the other cherry-ish furniture we have in there.
Some friends of ours had the same table and said they’d covered theirs with a decorative cloth. Ooh, good idea, I thought. Even slacker parents can slap a cloth on the silly thing. I filed that tidbit away for a rainy day.
Countless rainy days later, we have three children, who have used the table for Valentines, letters to family members, coffee-filter snowflakes for the windows, Play-Doh food, and various other creations. We never did sand, paint or stain that table.
Here is our SVALA today:
I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be a slacker parent.
11 Responses to “svala and the slacker parent”
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» There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. -Wendell Berry
» “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.” -Barbara Kingsolver
» It’s National Procrastination Week (who comes up with these things?), and in honor of people like me who like to celebrate NPW all year long, here’s a good article.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
I love it! It’s kind of like purposely scratching the bed of a new pickup truck so that you don’t ever have to worry about the first scratch! We’ve never done that but discussed it.
Your table is much more attractive just the way it is.
From one slacker parent to another!
Slack on!
I love this. Don’t ever paint over it. With luck you can still see traces of first letters carved into the wood on pencils through paper, with memories of someone working very hard to form the perfect “A” — or “C” or “M”.
Even our dining room table has those kinds of marks. I love it.
I’m a slacker g-parent. I’ve been known to visit a g-child and wear the same shirt they burped up on after returning home, just to not be so homesick for them…I really missed them so much that this little exchange seemed to comfort me. Can anyone top that?
Also, I remember my mother asking her cleaning person to not clean the g-kid fingerprints off her sliding glass door quite so soon after our visits there while we were living in Houston.
Oh…it is better than you could have imagined! Beautiful.
When you reach the point where they no longer can use it, you could varnish it with clear varnish (like a bartop finish). That is art!
When do they get to do the chairs?
I want one!
In div school town, there is a bar that has hung table tops on the wall—with all the hundreds of initials carved into them over time. I think they should hang up kid tables, too!
We have the same set and ours is also covered in crayoning.
Awesome Alex.
i love it and am inspired.
This is a darn sight better than those growth marks on the wall.
We bought the pre-finished version, but already have several crayon marks across it. I agree with the others - leave it and hang it as art when they grow out of it. It would be perfect.