Dining Table Top Completed

To expedite my posting on the dining table, I'm going to show the last couple of phases all at once.   After cutting all pieces, and laying them out, Emy and I distressed and stained the boards. One distressing method my wife had me try was burning the wood! Yup, I got a blow torch and burnt the wood and it not only darkened the wood but it brought the grain out more with a strong contrast.

With the boards all stained and laid out, I then glued and secured the boards. This was the first time that I did an inlaid top like this and I actually ran screws from the underside into each board. I've since been doing a technique that you would see in flooring, where each board is nailed (with nail gun) on edge and then the next board is butted up and covers the nailed edges.  This allowed me to move quickly and put one board after the other without waiting for the glue to dry.

Edges all cut. Now it is starting to actually look like a table!

The finishing touch for the top was the trim along the edges.

And after getting stained, it looked like this:

That's it for this post. I will conclude the dining table in one more post showing the legs and some finished product pictures.  Thanks for reading!

Dining Table...Top Assembly

Once the apron was complete, I began the top construction. One design change was to make the boards wider than the original design. The design had over 100 boards just over an inch wide. I went with 2 1/4" boards because it was looking to busy, plus it reduced the work needed.  

It was exciting to see the design to start take shape as I laid out the boards in the design.

After cutting all the pieces, I individually sanded the edges to give a worn rounded look to them. You can see it more pronounced once they've been sanded.  That will be the topic of the next post!

Thank you for reading!

Dining Table...Apron

The table top of any table is usually what gets noticed first, but behind (or in this case under) every good table top is a good apron! The table apron is panel that connects the top surface to the legs. This was my first phase of the table that I built.

To give the table more character and uniqueness, I decided to use reclaimed lumber. I got some reclaimed redwood for free off craigslist and cleaned it up a bit. The lumber had been used for an outdoor pergola, so I cleaned it off and sanded it a bit. Some pieces, like the cross members, I ran through the table saw to take some height off of them. I used a jointer on my shopsmith to make the top surfaces consistently flat so there would be a good flat surface for my table top to sit on.

The wood cleaned up nicely and has some old nail holes and I knew it would stain nicely.  You may be wondering about all of the angled holes in the picture. Those are pocket holes, and make an extremely strong and easy joinery to the table top that went on. I use a Kreg Pocket-Hole Jig system, and the thing is AMAZING. It saves so much time, is extremely strong, and you can't see these holes once the top is on. Of course there are projects that I don't use these for because you can see the holes, but when building something for strength, this does the trick!

After that I attached a 3/4 inch sheet of Birch hardwood plywood to start working on the table top! More to come in next post!

Custom Dining Table...Design

Last year I took on my biggest project yet. My family and I had recently moved into our rental home and the small 3' circle dining table just wasn't cutting it any more. My wife has great design sense showed me this coffee table for design inspiration.

I really like the chevron design and it reminded me of parquet floor or herringbone design. This was our second photo for design inspiration.

A great woodworking tool is actually my computer! With the help of my sister, Kim McIntyre (who also has a woodworking business in the Denver Area and sells online), we drew up the design on Google SketchUp.  SketchUp is a FREE sofware that is really intuitive and is used to model 3D objects, such as buildings or woodworking projects.  I have since used SketchUp to work with clients firm up their custom piece before actually building it.

Here are some screenshots of the design...

As you can see, we stuck with the cool chevron design on the top, and we really gravitated toward the trestle leg design to add some different lines to the table and create something unique.

We now had a design and it was time to start buying wood and get to work! My dad got me an old Shopsmith Mark V for Christmas off craigslist and it meant time for business!

More on the table to come!