If it gives you $1,500 worth of happiness to look at a table while you’re sitting at it, great. Doesn’t matter to me. Cheap tables are comfortable to eat at, too.
Dividing by the number of hours you sit at it makes the number seem smaller, but it’s still $1,500.
Besides, according to this thread, I can buy really nice (but no longer stylish) solid walnut furniture for like $20. That’s even better!
Well, yeah, sitting around at home is often cheaper than doing stuff.
**DInsdale, **If that should happen and you want to offload some, please let me know. I’m serious.
Heck, I pay about $16 per square foot of 1" thick rough walnut… I am going to start picking up these not stylish tables and reuse the lumber 
Hell, if we’re both hanging around these boards (and I’m still in control of my faculties) when I get to that point, you’ll get first choice after my kids!
Funny, how people differ. When we bought our second home, we decided that we wouldn’t bring anything of poor quality into our home. That has carried over to our present home, which we bought and furnished as empty nesters. We fully adhere to the arts and crafts credo: “Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
When we bought our first piece of Stickley - a Morris armchair, it was an amazing luxury splurge for us. Now, a couple of decades later, some might justifiably suggest we may have overdone it with the Stickley mission - we are at the point where we just bought a bunch of Stickley furniture and rug for a 3-season room. Amazing how one’s situation and perspective can change over the course of a lifetime.
Growing up with us in homes we decorated, our love for mission and arts and crafts design has had some effect on our kids and their preferences/styles. Just not sure they (and their partners) are as single-mindedly nuts about it as we - or that they will live in homes where our furniture will fit. They do seem to prefer owning fewer quality clothes and possessions than disposable quantity.
Next week we are sending our patio furniture out to be sandblasted and repainted. If we had bought cheaper stuff, we would likely have replaced it 2 or 3 times already. As is, it will be like new, and good for another decade or 2. We prefer to buy quality, and would generally rather go without, than buy something cheap.
And, for the record, we are comfortable, rather than rich. I’m a lifelong government employee, and my wife went to minimally part-time when our 3d kid was born. All 3 of our kids went to state colleges, and are now independent. We tend to be homebodies, and would rather buy nice things for our home than eat out a lot, travel luxuriously, or drive fancy cars. Just our preference.
I like Mission style/Arts & Crafts style furniture. So when I needed someplace to store some paper files, I thought about getting a two-drawer Stickley filing cabinet. A local furniture store is the authorized retailer for Stickley, so I contacted them via email. That one piece regularly costs about $2,000, although they were having a sale and it would cost around $1,500. That’s a lot for a very small piece of furniture. So I didn’t get it and I continue to use a putty-colored steel filing cabinet for file storage (doubling as a nightstand). Not terribly elegant. But if I ever come into money, I’ll move to a proper place and furnish it properly.
(Not intended to be a hijack.)
Heirloom furniture? Try giving away heirloom audio equipment. I have a couple very nice stereo systems that are not very old at all. I’m talking systems that originally cost over $8000 (each) just ten years ago. Nobody in the family is interested. I thought for sure that my nephew would want at least some of the equipment when he headed to college. No way. I would have killed to have had something of this quality when I was in school. Nope…he’s got a small BT speaker that suits him and his roomies just fine.
Tastes change. Just because I spent a lot of time (and money) finding and assembling something doesn’t mean anybody else shares the feelings.
Stickley is really expensive and possibly one of the few pieces of furniture that if your kids don’t want it, they’ll at least be able to sell it for something other than “please take this off my hands” on Craigslist. I’m also a huge arts and crafts/mission fan.
One of the things about furniture is that a lot of the heirloom furniture is pieces that aren’t useful any more. I don’t need a china cabinet, I gave all my china to Goodwill years ago. I don’t have a formal dining room - I don’t want a formal dining room table. I need a couch and a coffee table, bookshelves, a kitchen table and chairs, a desk and chair, and a bedroom set. (I need a little more than that because we have 3,000 sq feet to fill, but that’s all the furniture that I ever use - multiple the desk and chair and bedroom stuff for two kids plus a husband - though we do share that bed). The couches have the dogs on them - I certainly don’t want heirloom pieces for dogs to chew on and lie on (puppies chew, and sometimes the chew the corners off your coffee table).
Thirty years ago when I was young and poor I went though a batch of “someone’s old couch” with a slipcover over it. Or “someone’s old headboard” “someone’s old coffee table” - “I think Grandma still has an extra old kitchen table in her basement if you need it” - and honestly was grateful for it. But it was then the stuff that you now get rid of on Craigslist with the “please take this off my hands.”