Whoever leaves the cushions out when rain is forecast has still, to this day, never once apologized for it, and at this point we’ve stopped expecting them to. The forecast said showers. The cushions stayed on the chairs. This has happened four times.
That’s really the whole story of owning a rattan dining set, though, isn’t it. It’s not the table that causes the arguments, it’s the maintenance of the table, and specifically who remembers to do it. We bought ours for a garden that gets used maybe five properly warm months a year and neglected for the other seven, and the set has had to survive that neglect right alongside us.
One wet winter, the first one, we left it out under a cover that turned out to be more decorative than functional, and by March the weave had gone a sort of tired grey and one of the chair legs had started to wobble like it was thinking about giving up entirely.
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Nobody wanted to be the one who suggested throwing it out after eight months of ownership, so instead we just quietly bought a better cover and pretended the first winter hadn’t happened.
The shopping process itself was its own small war. Half the arguments weren’t even about the set, they were about how much space the garden actually has, which apparently is a matter of serious dispute among people who share the garden. One faction wanted the round table because it looks better in photos, which is a genuinely unhinged reason to choose outdoor furniture but we’re including it because it’s true. The other faction wanted the rectangular one because it seats six without anyone’s elbow ending up in someone else’s plate. The rectangular table won, and the person who lost has still not fully let it go, bringing it up at semi-regular intervals as though a rematch might somehow be scheduled.
What we actually like about it, once it’s up and surviving the season, is that it looks properly finished the moment you put anything on it. Glasses, a jug, someone’s abandoned phone charger, it all just sits right on the thing in a way plastic never quite managed for us. What we don’t like is that it needs looking after in a way none of us fully signed up for, and that the person who insisted “it’ll be fine, it’s rated for outdoor use” was, it turns out, talking about the frame and not the cushions, a distinction that became extremely clear the hard way.
The verdict, such as it is, came down to the cover argument in the end. Buy the set you actually like, sure, but buy the proper cover on day one, because the version of you standing in the garden in November wondering why nobody dealt with this is going to be furious, and honestly, deserves to be.
