We Put a Ping Pong Table in Our Living Room

Me explaining to people how we ended up with a ping pong table in our living room

I spend a lot of time at home these days. Like, a LOT of time. Unhealthy amounts. Many days it's just me and our dog at the house for hours at a time. I love our dog, and I do often talk to (at?) him, but for the most part, it's me alone with my thoughts. For hours at a time. Like Red explains to Ernie and Heywood in Shawshank, spending that much time surrounded by the same four walls can drive a man insane. I like to think this at least partly explains how we ended up putting a ping pong table in our living room.

Let me go back a bit. We've been in our house since 2009. We love our house, but it has a unique layout that has always given us some trouble. Our living room is a wide-open space, and we could never figure out a good way to set it up. For the first 15 years of our time here, we truly had a terrible layout.

There's a fireplace in the living room, but we never use it, mostly because I'm afraid I'll burn the house down. Naturally we made that the focus of the entire room. We put our couch directly in front of it, and the TV on the wall above. Come son, let's gather around this near-constant reminder of your father's inadequacy as a homeowner. Wonderful way for the family to relax.

Me if I ever see the Jordan's furniture guy in public

To make matters worse, we furnished the living room with a couch we don't really like. We liked it when we bought it, but hated it almost as soon as we brought it home. It's supposed to have recliners on both ends, but those stopped working almost immediately. To get the recliner to come up, I have to stick my hand under the footrest and pop the bar underneath in exactly the right spot. I hate it so much. Every time I see the Jordan's furniture guy in a commercial, I wish I could jump through the TV and dropkick him across the room.

We also made the mistake of buying it in a light tan color. Not a wise decision. Lot of spills in this house. You'd think our young son is to blame, but no, it's mostly me. Not sure why, but I have a way of plopping myself down when I go to sit on the couch. I was going through a chocolate milk phase at one point, and plopped myself down from such a height that the entire mug spilled all over me and the couch. My wife was not pleased. That was an unfortunate incident. Our dog is by far the worst offender though. He likes to jump up on the couch and slobber all over himself. There's drool stains all over it thanks to him. We try to stop him from time to time, but it's pointless. To add insult to injury, he likes to stare us down while he does it.

We had our dining table on one side of the couch, but didn't really like that much either. There wasn't a ton of room, so it was always a bit too cramped at the table, especially on the side by the wall. Any time anyone wanted to sit on that side of the table, they had to maneuver around a lamp and basically wedge themself between the table and the wall. God forbid they ever wanted to get up. They'd have to push the table into anyone across from them so they could swing their legs to the side and slink out. Hey, mind if I just jam this table into your ribs while I go grab a drink? Thanks a ton. We almost never sat at that dining table. The other side of the couch was even worse. It was just an empty space we could never figure out how to use. So essentially 2/3rds of our living room was unused space, and the 1/3rd we DID use, we didn't even like.

Me looking at our living room

The more I was at home, the more this layout started to bother me. I hated it more and more, until finally I couldn't take it anymore. I got up one morning and just started shifting everything around. My wife and son woke up to me sliding things around the room like a man possessed. I moved the couch to one side of the room and disassembled our bookshelf so it was in 3 parts around the room.

My family was a bit skeptical at first. I don't blame them. I'm not always known for my sound decision-making skills. Even our dog didn't know what to think. I can basically do no wrong in his eyes, but he ran into the other room to hide. Admittedly, it took some time to come together. My cousin came into town and was the hero we needed to get the TV moved to the side wall of the room. That really tied the room together.

Me explaining to my wife how putting a ping pong table in the living room makes sense

We now had the TV and couch in the formerly empty space, and the dining table in front of the fireplace, so I no longer had to stare at it whenever I sat down to watch TV. What a relief. The side of the living room that originally had the dining table was empty and it was clear what we were missing: a ping pong table. My wife and I had toyed with the idea of getting a ping pong table for a while but didn't really have the space. Putting one in the living room always seemed like a bridge too far. Until now. Maybe being at home has driven me crazy, but it seemed to make a lot of sense, and my wife agreed. Maybe I'm so sane, I just blew her mind.

To be fair, it's one of those "classy" ping pong tables that you can convert into a pool table, OR a dining table. We mostly leave it as a ping pong table though. We'll sometimes have people over to the house to do some work, and I wonder if they think we're a family of hardcore ping pong fanatics. We do enjoy a game of ping pong, and my wife and I did go to see "Marty Supreme", but we are by no means die-hard ping pong players. Every time we do play, we always end up saying we should really play more. For the most part though, it sits mostly unused. So now instead of having a dining table we don't use, we have a ping pong table we don't use. We still like it more than our old dining table though.