The Periodic Table!

It's finally here! Well, it was finally here last Thursday. Here is my brand-new dining room table!!! It measure 72 inches without the leaf and 96 inches with the leaf.



Here's how it arrived (unpacked from the boxes, of course):



Since it came in pieces, I got/had to assemble the base first and then bolt it to the tabletop. Fortunately, it arrived on Thursday, which is when the guys from my Sunday school class come over for the evening. This gave me plenty of muscle to turn it upright (I put it together upside down since that was by far the easiest way to do it).

The leaf folds up in a rather unusual way (at least to me). First, as with all expandable tables, you pull the ends apart:



This was particularly cool because it had a rack-and-pinion type gear on it so that a person (me) can do this by themselves:



Then the leaf folds in the middle...



And tucks neatly under the tabletop:



And here's the table without the leaf (the first picture has the leaf in it, in case you hadn't caught that):



And this is what the base looks like:



It only took Oak Express 37 days to get it here from Denver (or wherever they ordered it from). I've joked that I'm thinking of calling them just Oak because of their punctuality. All in all, I'm pretty happy with my new table. It's sturdy, and easily sat 8 of us around it this past Sunday night while we carved some pumpkins (don't worry, I put my big blue tarp on it to protect it).