Furniture for the young kid years?

[Treasuremapper]

My taste in furniture is modern, or mid-century modern Heywood Wakefield type stuff. But now that I have young children, and I see what they can do to furniture, I'm thinking that I want inexpensive, indestructible furniture, instead of saying "no" all the time to them. I'm talking Rooms to Go type stuff. If someone hurts a rooms to go $200 coffee table I'm going to have a very different feeling than if they ruin my vintage HW table.

I'm thinking -- "marble" topped nightstands for dh and me so that I am not always badgering the kids "use a coaster".

Does anyone have any opinions on this? Should I get what I want and try to teach my daughters to respect it, or give up and just use "leather touch" sofas for a few years?

[crl]

Well, we have a bit of a mix. Our kitchen table is Ikea for example. To my mind, perfect for lots of worry free art projects for the next few years and then I can replace it with something nicer.

I do already have some nicer things that are less likely to see as much kid interaction, ie dry sink in living room. But, my style is 1800s antiques so my "nicer" stuff is already distressed and a bit more doesn't matter. And I don't have anything of museum quality. If the stuff you like requires more gentle handling, I guess I wouldn't aquire more of it until the kids are older. But I hate worrying about stuff, so maybe that's just me.

[cloudswinger]

I found a really cool modern black leather set at a garage sale, with a huge ottoman that we can use for our feet, as a table, etc. It was in pretty good shape, a few cuts here and there, but I figured that when dd got older we can recover with fresh leather and have a nicer set.

I'd probably do mostly kid friendly stuff with one or two nice pieces so they can learn to take care of some things but not have to worry about it all the time. But probably not a really nice piece, if it only takes a small mistake to ruin something, the kid will do it.

[Conteuse]

Our son is 6 now, but I still haven't stopped pining (no pun intended) after This End Up furniture!

Man, if we had some of that, we'd NEVER have to buy furniture again!

[KimProbable]

We bought basically all of our furniture second-hand both because of the kid factor and because of not having much money to start out. The way we figure, kids are messy and like to climb on things.

At the moment, I know for a fact that my couch has a chocolate chip smeared in it from DD's muffin two days ago and it's got sesame seeds on it from the asparagus spear she snuck out of the kitchen last night. It gets brushed off, vacuumed, spot cleaned, and occasionally steam cleaned. My kids eat all over the house and rarely eat at the kitchen table.

Once the kids are grown up a bit, I plan to start replacing the workable furniture with nicer stuff. The only exception is the new kitchen table I'm getting this summer.

[SAHMinHawaii]

I would get something quality to withstand use. Definitely teach your children to respect their furniture and belongings. I wouldn't buy something cheap so they have the "right" to wreck it. We have pretty nice furniture and no damage has been done. For the first 5 years of having children we had a marble topped dining table. We just outgrew it and got a huge square pottery barn table. In our dds room, they share a full size pine sleigh bed. There are a few dings in the footboard from my dds banging something on it, but it adds character. My MIL had this beautiful dining table, unfortunately now it burned up in a housefire. But there was a huge discoloration from her kids putting a hot pizza in box on the table. There was also dried glitter on the table from where her 9 year old dd was doing an art project. She could of easily had this "fixed" but she refused. When we had a formal dinner, she would cover it with a table cloth. But she said the table told stories. After the fire she had all the money she wanted to replace the table. She did with a custom $4,000 table..but she said it wasn't the same without those memories like the glitter on it.

[momto l&a]

I believe in having good quality furniture and having the kids learn respect.

I myself grew up in a house of antiques and loved it.

Dh and I are in the process of replacing our nasty furniture with stuff we love that quality. The girls see how much we love the stuff and respect the furniture because of that.

We also make sure the stuff we buy for the kids is good quality.

SAHMinHawii I love your MIL thinking about the table, its so sweet. Have heard of other pople being the same way for example with a rocker their kids teethed on.

[moderngal]

We love modern furniture, but with 2 big furry dogs and a growing family, it's not worth it to me. Our couch is leather, but Ikea and much of our other furniture is Ikea or stuff my dad made. I think it'll be this way at least until our dogs pass. My son knows to respect our things, but he's a toddler and I think it's unreasonable to expect he won't damage things at some point.
There's plenty of time for the Noguchi table I need later.