Dining set: buy new or refinish a used set?

It's been a "Be careful what you wish for" summer, with one thing leading to another. The desire to pull out the upstairs carpeting in favor of a wood floor kept me busy for two months. No, I'd say three. And we didn't even install the floor ourselves. There was packing and moving out, at least to the garage and downstairs. And then painting. And then the question, "Do we really want to put all this stuff back like it was?" That question generated weeks of work. And back and shoulder pain. Kick me if I ever propose to install pull-out shelves in an existing cabinet again. This was for music storage, and it's nice, but the manufacturer wasn't kidding when they rated the alternate installation on exact-sized uprights as "challenging."

How we arrived at swapping out our dining table and chairs, who can remember? Oh, yes. The rolling office chair that was more comfortable than the hard dining chairs now is a problem--non-rubber wheels that likely would dent and groove our new floor. Skipping the details, let's just report that I drove our pickup to Renton for a Craigslist 1942 table and chairs in the Duncan Phyfe style.

When I got there it was clear the chairs would need refinishing, the table a repair, and were they really the mahogany we had set our caps for?

What we didn't know about furniture! However, the instinct to stay with "old" seem to be turning out well, if our repair and refinish expert is right.

So unlike the patio set, I didn't buy new from a factory far away, and instead boosted the local economy (the refinisher's business). We'll know in a couple of weeks how this calculus turns out.