For those of you following my Instagram and Facebook pages, you know the excitement happening with the building of our new dining table! I have spent months looking for inspiration; the perfect dining chairs, centerpiece, stain and overall design for this table. It has truly been a labor of love that the entire family took part in & that makes it even more special. Recently, I have been fully inspired (obsessed maybe) by mid century and Scandinavian styles and so I wanted to show that in the kitchen. I gave myself a headache looking for the perfect chairs for hours, only to choose the chairs that I have had my eye on for months! They're so perfectly dreamy, I can't wait for you to see them! As for the actual table, we decided when making our wood wall (you can see on a previous post!) that we would use the left over wood for the table top! We purchased wood at Home Depot to build a frame & legs. As much as I wanted to add hairpin legs, my husband wasn't a fan & so (being the great wife that I am :) ) I compromised! I found a really cool image of an angled, wood table leg that we recreated. I didn't want big, bulky, straight legs because I wanted to move away from the farmhouse style. Plus, heavy pieces of furniture don't really go well with my house because of the size of the rooms. We (my husband, Steve and my oldest son) started with the frame. I wanted the table slightly smaller than standard because of the size of the eating area in our kitchen, so we went with 5 foot long and used 7 fence panels so the final table is 38.5 inches wide. For the frame we decided to go slightly smaller so there would be some overhang. The frame is 4 ft x 35 inches. Once that part was assembled we added 5 cross beams that Steve ripped down about 1/4 in. with the table saw so that there would be a small space to lay a sheet of plywood in there and have it lay flush with the frame. We decided on the ply wood, thanks to the advice of my father in law, just to give it extra support. With 3 boys running around here you never know what's going to happen at that table! As for the table top with the fence panels, this was pretty simple, but dirty! I gave them a good sanding and then scrubbed them up really good with a scrub brush, hot water and lysol. They sat a few hours to dry the and we attached them to the frame using a nail gun! I picked all my boards individually, checking for color, knots and anything else that gave them their own unique character! I will share with you a lesson that I learned. If your using sand paper and not an electric sander, wear gloves or you'll rub your skin raw on the sandpaper. OOPS!! It healed up after about a day though, thankfully. I just cleaned my hands really well and used my rejuvenating cream from Arbonne - good as new! Next step was the legs. We used 3 separate pieces for each side. The legs we recreated were slightly slanted with a cross bar. My husband cut the legs at a 20 degree angle on both ends, we drilled those in and measured the distance between the two. He then cut the cross boards to that measurement and we drilled those in. Viola - now we had a table! I had to create a stain color to resemble the color of the aged fence panels. I purchased a gray stain and a dark walnut stain from Home Depot to mix my own color. I quickly discovered that I hate gray stain on its own. I mean, I may as well have used gray paint, but it did do well mixed with the walnut! I added probably 2 tablespoons of the gray to about 3/4 cup of the walnut and came up with a pretty good match. I did one coat of this stain on all of the raw wood that we purchased after sanding it down smooth. As for a polyurethane, I used a satin finish so that it wouldn't take too much away from the raw, reclaimed wood look. I did 5 or 6 coats - I cant remember- on the table top and two coats for the legs and frame. In between coats I used an 80 grit sand paper to smooth out any bubbles in the poly and made sure to clean up the dust before applying another coat. Now the table is as smooth as can be, but looks like old wood - just what I envisioned!! The hardest part of the entire table was waiting for the UPS & Fed Ex truck to drive by my house with my chairs!! Until then, it didn't feel complete. The kids didn't seem to mind though - as you can see with all the toys :)I couldn't be happier with the final result! The rustic wood table top, clean white chairs with the steel legs and a simple aloe plant centerpiece gave me the exact look and feel that I was going for! Let me me know what you think in the comments! XO - Kathleen
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KathleenCreator of Our Honeysuckle Homestead. Archives
May 2017
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