I get asked a lot “How’s your table coming?” Well to be honest, it’s not. We got busy. Adam got a 2nd job. His shop got swamped. And our poor table top has been shoved under his work bench since November.
We did have good intentions of getting done by Christmas-but it just didn’t work out. Life got in the way. The good news is things are slowing down at the Ice Palace and there has been some progress at his work.
I realized I never did do a follow up with the work we DID do. I think it was Halloween that we got into the shop one Sunday afternoon and got started on our boards.
If you recall they were in pretty bad shape.
And even after pulling out a ton of nails at the store, there where still more that had to come out.
So Adam got to work and I snapped pictures. Ha ha no…I did help.
On a side note; I was wearing an old pair of tennis shoes I kept in my car. Well a few years in the trunk of a car in Florida is not good for shoe glue we found out.
Yes, that is the sole of my shoe.
But not to worry, Adam had a solution…
He shrink wrapped my shoe! 
Unfortunately it didn’t last….so I waddled around sole-less for most of the day.
Ok. Back to our wood.
Adam’s shop has this nice wide sanding belt. He explained how you adjust the grit and height and you put the wood in and it spits it out all pretty. Well if I recall right-it wasn’t that simple.
We spent the better part of the day sanding and sanding and sanding our boards until finally they looked…..
Great!
Before:
After:
I kid you not that is the SAME board! We got very excited as the layers of paint/stain/age were sanded off and this beautiful wood was revealed beneath. Most of the wood is, we think, Heart Pine. It’s very hard and has a really pretty grain. About 1/2 of the wood was a blond color and the other a deeper amber color.
After we had everything sanded we started to cut our pieces. We needed to cut off the bad stuff and see what we were left with. And in order for the table to layout it had to be all the same widths.
I think this is where we got into an argument over how wide the boards should be and blah blah blah…but it was so long ago it’s not worth brining up. But I’m pretty sure I did use the Architect card.oops.
It didn’t take long for us to realize our 15-12’ boards might not be enough for our gigantic table. There were a lot of unusable pieces. We focused on the main top, since the leafs are smaller and laid out what we had. After some finagling we ended up with this:
Keep in mind there will be another blond full length on the left making it 42” wide and close to 6’ long. She definitely went from an ugly duckling to a sawn! We were very happy and excited. After the LONG day in shop Adam stayed after work the following week and glued the pieces together then cut it down to size. The leaves still need to be laid out and we think we finally found a solution to the non existent hinge I “used” when designing it. We’ll stack the folding legs which will be a much easier solution.
New design above. Old design below.
It might be a little awkward looking when they’re up-but if they are we figure there will be 12 people around it and no one is going to really notice:
So why after all these months am I finally writing about this again? Well we’re gearing up to get back to work! Adam, after a mishap with disappearing wood, has the legs cut and glued, ready to be sanded and stained. (we’re using poplar). All that we need to do now is put the legs on the main part of the table and sand/finish/stain it all. Adam feels that the leaves (which are in a nice pile in our dining room) can be installed at home. Plus since we don’t really NEED our 12’ of dining space right this instant we can hold off…a smidge…on that.
I appologize for the 6 month laps in updates on this project…but like I said, Life got busy. Hopefully I’ll have the final product for you soon…then you can all come over for diner!
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