New Kitchen Table

Mollie and I bought a kitchen table when we first got married.  It was one of our few pieces of new furniture for many years.  After three kids and nine years, the table is getting a little small for our needs, especially when we have company over.

As with the last few of our projects, we got ideas and plans from Ana White's blog. After thinking about it for a while, we decided to make the table bigger.  It's 52 inches wide, 72 long.  After buying the wood, I spent a very long time sanding and preparing the wood.  From our previous projects (here) we learned that sanding and finishing takes the most time, and is easiest to do before you start putting things together.  While doing all the sanding (seriously weeks), I got a Kreg Jig for Christmas.  This tool is awesome, and we figured that the table was the right project to practice.  So we deviated a bit from the plan's on Ana's blog and jigged together everything so you can't see any screw holes. For example, in this picture, I'm jigging the underside supports to the edge skirts.

After sanding and measuring, we put the legs and sides up.  We squared the table and put on the underside supports.

This is where we figured out that my inspection of boards at Lowes was not careful enough.  I spent seriously over an hour looking through stacks of lumber trying to find boards that were straight.  I thought I did a good job, but we could see when we put the table together that the long side skirts were twisted, and that made the width different along the length of the table.  We could fit in all but the last board.

After several attempts to put the table together, we instead started to finish the pieces separately.  We had managed to get some stain from Ikea which perfectly matches the chairs that we bought there.  We took our time and put on six coats of stain.  This stain took a while to really get the right color.  Then we put on the polyurethane and all the pieces were ready!  Finishing seriously took at least a week.  Luckily the garage was warm enough to do it there.

By then my parents were visiting us, and we really needed the table finished.  I showed my dad the twisted board and how the table top wouldn't fit.  I had tried to sand down the differences, but it takes a long time to sand down 1/16 of an inch.  Dad suggested that I get a chisel, which was perfect.  It took me 10 minutes to get everything to fit.  We then had Mollie and my Dad stand on the top of the table while I screwed the table top into the undersupports.  I needed them to stand on it to make sure it was a flat as it could be, small warps and twists were removed.  Here's a few shots of the final.