Euca-Euca

I did it.

Most of the time I leave products sitting in my online shopping carts, you know, you can probably relate, to sleep on the buy and not act so impulsively, and most of the time I come to my senses and realize I don’t need to buy whatever chairs/curtains/vases/shoes/wow-I-do-this-a-lot, but hear ye, hear ye, we now we have a fab new accessory to our flagstone patio: a Plow & Hearth coffee table that’s even better than I had cautiously expected.

Side note: I shall disclose that winter and spring makes our backyard look horrendous, I’m sure you understand. I have lots of big plans for that gardening bed surrounding our patio come May.

Side note #2: Wrong time to poll, considering I’ve been wearing my jeans like this since January, but is having skinny jeans tucked into short boots an OK look, or do I carry too much of a Peter Pan vibe? Serious question.

The little eucalyptus table was really something that we needed back there; a patio is only so good as how you’re going to make use of it, and while we did regularly pull our deck glasstop table and chairs back there for afternoon work sessions and dinners last summer, we had been keeping an eye out for a more permanent piece.

I really liked it when I first came across it (and reported on it in this post on springtime outdoor finds), and it got even more cred when I started to weigh in the fact that it was being sold on Amazon by reputable outdoor furniture distributor Plow & Hearth and had specs that would compliment both the size of the round patio and the size of our adored adirondack chairs. I could hardly say no, which is why it only took me about 1.5 minutes to decide to buy it up.

It was priced at just over $100 which isn’t a huge investment when you consider that it’s solid wood (and eucalyptus, at that, which is durable and weather-resistant and muscly-strong in nature). Before I bought, I did do some price comparisons on the Plow & Hearth website to find that this year’s comparable products would make me believe that the same table would have retailed around $150 normally. (Visiting the site also made me want this bench and an eucalyptus rolling cart).

It assembled in lightning-like speed with the tightening of a few bolts (my kind of furniture, it didn’t even require little IKEA demonstration men):

And as I promptly placed it on the deck to alleviate furniture congestion in our living room, it accumulated it’s first 2 inches of snow overnight. Welcome to Rochester, bud. Weather up.

The good thing about the eucalyptus, as I told myself after seeing it covered in snow on it’s first night outdoors, is that it’s going to weather nicely over time. The product arrived finished with protectant and ready for the elements, and we can maintain ourselves annually myself with teak or tung oil, or else let it weather down into a beautiful gray over the years so that it eventually comes closer to matching our hand-me-down adirondack chairs.

It’s meant to be left out, rain or shine, so that’s how I’ll treat it this year and see how it holds up.

In any case, it’s the much-needed surface that we needed for our notebooks/magazines/laptops/umbrella drinks, and I know it’s presence will instantly make our patio more trafficked come warm weather.