Yard sneak peek & Table Dilemma

I'm down-sizing - the house's living/dining room area is much smaller than what I had in the apartment. I suppose, ideally, I should get rid of my large-ish mid 90's sofa sleeper & my awesome if large Ikea table and get something appropriate for the space. But I'm po' right now (since all my money has gone into making the house livable) so that's not an option. Socal thought (and I agreed) that a plan might be to sell the dining table (and its matching sidetable) and get a table for the patio which would become my "dining room."

I liked this idea a lot - it would give me more room in the living room (I could move the club chair & ottoman back to the living room & have more space in the office...like, say, for maybe a treadclimber...). So I started hunting for outdoor tables & chairs, hoping that I might get lucky with the July 4th sales. As I started checking measurements, I very quickly saw that most tables were about the same size as my awesome IKEA table and the chairs were generally larger. Should I go through the hassle of selling my table & buying new stuff or should I just "weatherproof" my IKEA table & chairs? (The chairs have a water/stain resistant faux suede microfiber, but I can easily change that to a more "outdoorsy" fabric if I wanted to.) [Because of the size of the patio, round tables block the "flow" so I'm sticking to rectangular tables...unless I got a little bistro table, but what's the point in getting a teeny table that barely seats 2? :) ] That's my dilemma-of-the-week. Hmm. Maybe after the exterior painting is done, I think I will "test drive" putting the IKEA table back there to see if I'm comfortable with that.

Anyway, what you really want are pictures:
My hibiscus:


Our little orange tree:


Here's Lola showing off the new lawn in the backyard: