For some Halloween is a time of horror and headaches, but for me Halloween is more about harvest and projects. I love how Halloween provides an opportunity to share creative moments with my family and friends. Between making my boys their costumes and hosting pumpkin carving gatherings with our friends, Halloween is a wonderful low-key way to kick-off the hectic onslaught of the Holiday Season.

After we moved into our house here in Pacifica we had Dexter’s friends and family over to carve up some pumpkins. Between five kids, three Moms, and four pumpkins (not to mention the gallons of scooped out pumpkin guts) my dining room table reached its maximum capacity in an instant! While our table does just fine for our family’s day-to-day needs, attempting to comfortably find space for more than 4 people (and pumpkins!) presented an obvious capacity problem.

A Dining Table Isn’t Just for Eating

When you are starting on a project of any size—an open furniture plan, picking a dining room table or even selecting kitchen counters—you need to factor in a number of variables. While the look, comfort and color are all important elements in making a selection, the first part of my design process, which I generally refer to as the “Discovery Phase,” starts with how you want to be living in the space. If you make a list of how you want to live, and design for that from day one, you will create an easy and comfortable environment. You’ll find that once you start designing with the activities you’d like to accomplish in mind, in essence, you’re planning for the life you want to live. As a result those activities become natural and more likely to happen.

Had I taken my own words of wisdom into account when we were first moving in, I probably wouldn’t have made the decision to recycle my Grandfather’s trestle table as our dining room table. While paying homage with the table provides an emotional comfort to our home, the large width and shortened length of it hinder us from getting the full physical comfort out of our lean and lengthy dining space.

Yes, an activity like pumpkin carving (which typically happens only once a year) isn’t generally reason enough to make a purchasing decision on a dining room table, it’s factoring in activities such as these into your initial decision making process that will help create a harmoneous living experience for for the every day and the special ones.