Design & Cleaning Tip!

I know, that's awesome right? A design tip AND cleaning tip? It's all about my dining room table and things you should know. Ha! I fell in love with my dining room table in the store. I was building my farmhouse style home and thought it would be perfect!

Well, let me tell you how wrong I was. Here's your design tip. If you buy a dining room table, don't get one with pretty little grooves! The slats are gorgeous and fit into my style and match my wood floors that are in the room next to the dining room so aesthetically, LOVE IT! But crumbs and spills? Uggh! Seriously, how did it not occur to me that the bread crumbs from a Thanksgiving Dinner would be more work to clean than all the dishes? I do think that if the manufacture would fill the grooves with a sealer or lacquer that is used on the wood or something that it would be fine but my grooves are thin and DEEP!

So this weekend, I have been scrapbooking a lot! I had some girlfriends over and one of them, Lisa, made an awesome wall hanging for my pool house, that I am still working on! Someday hopefully soon I will share that with you! One of her cool techniques is to sand the edges of paper and boards! As she worked, I knew my pretty little table was going to annoy me the next day! We all made a mess and had bits of paper everywhere! Here is an area of my table this morning! Check out the pretty stuff in the grooves. I have used a steak knife to pop crumbs out of these grooves before.

So I was cleaning up today and the perfect solution occurred to me! My boys had so much fun helping me keep our automatic vacuum thingy in the area around the table. Then I thought, why not use it on the table? So that's my cleaning tip--use your automatic vacuum on your annoying slat table if I am too late to give you a design tip and you have one too-- it works perfectly! I am not freaked at what germs may be on my floor that I just put on my table because I just wiped it down with a lysol wipe after and I set my scrapbook stuff on the floor and then put it on the table so what's the difference? We don't really eat here much anyway--it's a clever cover up for my craft area as all my tools and such are in the next open area! I also love a good tablecloth so I would cover it for the random meal anyway! It worked great and my boys had so much fun watching it (there's a sensor so it won't even fall off, goes to the edge and spins!) that I thought I would share!

I'm going to scrapbook again in 45 minutes with a great friend so I may be doing this again tonight!