Hosting Outside

One thing I want to continue long after the need to social distance has ended is hosting outside. Having guests is stressful for me because my house is never guest-ready. Never. Usually my house requires multiple hours of pick up before I can even get to the cleaning phase. I do NOT invite people over much because the effort required to make my house presentable is not (to me) worth the fun of having someone over.

But when we host outside, that isn’t an issue! I really like hosting outside. We have a lot of space in our backyard (even if it’s not particularly nice space), and I love keeping the chaos of guests outside, away from the house. It is a pain to take things back and forth but that is really the only negative. (Our back stairs are not safe (they need to be torn down) so I have to walk to the front of the house, through the garage and back down the hall to get outside, but it’s the same walk I take to our bedroom in the old tenant’s unit so I’m used to it).

When kids are allowed inside again, I will definitely try to keep a large portion of “play dates” outside. Yes it’s always windy, and frequently foggy, but the weather almost always allows for being outside here. So I want to keep hosting there.

That is one of the reasons we got a new outside table. Our picnic table was in ROUGH shape. It had been out there since we bought the place, and it was falling apart. When I finally went to take it apart (we couldn’t get it through the hall to the front of the house without dismantling it) I was able to just pull it apart with my hands. That is how rotted the wood was. It was a big table, and we got a lot of good use out of it (especially this past year!) but it was time for it to go.

We got a new table from IKEA. We buy almost all our furniture from IKEA and I wasn’t looking to do that again, but this table is simple, fits our needs, and got good reviews on Wire Cutter so we went for it. We just put it together today. It seats four with benches and another four when the leaves are up. We got folding chairs for the extra seating.

We put all of it together today. We stripped two screws on the first chair we tried to build but otherwise it all came together nicely. (I got approximations of the screws from a hardware store because I REALLY don’t want to drive back to IKEA! We’ll see if they do the job.) It’s exciting to have it (almost) all ready!

Next weekend, when the grandparents come over for our daughter’s family birthday, all of us can sit at the table! This is a big deal. We don’t have any table in our house that fits eight – we only host for our kids birthdays when both sets of grandparents come at the same time – so having one for outside it awesome. And when we bring down the leaves it has a much smaller footprint than the previous picnic table.

We even got a cover for it so it will (hopefully) last a lot longer.

We have a big (obscenely big for San Francisco IMHO) backyard and it’s so nice to use that space for hosting. Our house is not that big and it’s never clean, so using our outside space makes a ton of sense.

Yay for our new table!