Although our daughter has been happily decorating her starter home for the past year, that love of decorating must have skipped a generation because my husband and I never really got into it. We still have an old coffee table in our living room that was probably made in the 1950s and looks worn, with chipped veneer, but we like it because of the dimensions. It’s much longer then most tables nowadays (66 inches) and is a comfortable size for pizza or hamburgers while watching TV. Because we’ve had it for over 30 years, any table of a different size wouldn’t feel right to us.

A few years ago, we thought about taking the table somewhere to be refurbished, but we never got around to it. Then we decided that we might prefer to buy a more modern-looking table of about the same length, and maybe a little deeper and higher, and then give the old one to a thrift store.

Online searches for oversized coffee tables never turned up anything that we liked, though. The dimensions were wrong, the color was too dark, or the style didn’t suit us. Of course, there are plenty of places where we could order a custom-made table, but that would be expensive and we’d rather spend less, especially after we had to replace both our refrigerator and our air conditioner this year.

So I decided to write this post as an exercise in attracting what I want by being precise about it. Self-help authors often describe attraction as a magical process of aligning one’s vibrations with the Universe, while others have a more practical focus on harnessing the power of the subconscious mind to notice and act on small details. Regardless, the aim is to take a first step toward improving one’s circumstances by visualizing the desired changes clearly.

A living room table may seem like a trivial item, but after so many years of regular use, I think it can fairly be described as meaningful to my everyday family life; and I am thankful for all the pizza nights and other good memories. I am looking to replace it with a new table that is (1) wood; (2) rectangular; (3) between 66 and 68 inches long; (4) between 20 and 24 inches deep; (5) between 16 and 18 inches high; (6) a color similar to my current table, not too dark or light; (7) sturdy, but not so heavy as to be difficult to move; and (8) a reasonably affordable mass-market item that can easily be ordered online.

Okay, Universe, work your magic!