We built ours in about four months! Here’s how.
First we found some plans on the internet for this “farmhouse” style table and matching benches. Mark tallied up the necessary wood, and then we hauled it all back in Sijia’s car from Lowe’s. I don’t remember what kind of wood it was, but basically we got a bunch of 2x4's and 2x6's, lots of screws, and some stuff for coloring the wood.
For a few weeks we didn’t have time to start the project, so all of this wood was just sitting in our living room.
The plans we found recommended using a Kreg jig. Basically this gives you an adjustable angled tunnel that you can stick an electric drill into to make a diagonal hole in wood. Then you can drill in a screw through the hole to connect the wood to more wood.
As you can see on the left picture of the tabletop, there are small gaps between the pieces of wood, because the wood we bought is not perfectly straight, and because it has rounded corners. We filled in the cracks with wood filler because we planned to eat on the table and didn’t want crumbs getting stuck there. More experienced wood workers will sometimes first run their wood through a big saw to straighten the edges so that it fits together nicely and is easier to work with, but as I learned from talking to my manager and our landlord, the important thing is just that you’re doing something, and you’re doing it yourself.
We put the table top on some blocks of wood and used it as our table for a few weeks, and also forced our guests to use it at our dumpling party for the Chinese New Year.
Next, we stained the tabletop. According to the instructions on the can, you may also apply something called pre-stain to the wood to help it absorb the stain better, so we did that too. Staining is different from painting because you wipe off the actual fluid that you paint onto the surface, but the color of the wood changes permanently.
Next we assembled the frame and the legs. Our landlord let us borrow his tools, including lots of clamps, sanders, and a Miter saw, which I originally heard pronounced “midder” and thereafter assumed was called that because you can cut things down the middle until my manager asked me, confused, “do you mean might-er?”. If I had just seen it written down before I heard it pronounced — alas, the pen is Miter than the word.
In the above pictures, the top is not attached to the legs. We had our table up like this for a couple of days, until it fell over, predictably, and we had to reattach the ends. Sijia did this mostly by herself because she knocked it over, but I helped a little bit. For the second attach José, our landlord, came downstairs and helped her chisel out a simple wood joint (the noun for the thing you make when you do wood joinery, a term which I find makes much more sense since you’re joining wood together.) José also explained that wood expands and contracts with the weather, so joints have much better longevity than screws, since the wood breathes at the same rate. For this reason, you might also choose to use pegs instead of screws.
To create the cross beams in the middle of the frame, we grabbed some grid paper, drew out diagrams, and tried to use math to figure out the angles but we made a mistake somewhere and ended up eyeballing it. It was close enough that it still attached together, and the table has yet to break so I’m feeling good about it.
We painted the frame white and applied polyurethane to give it a glossy look and protect the wood from moisture and rot. This step was extremely satisfying and the smooth shiny surface of our table is still the best part.
By this point I had chatted with my manager a few times about our project and we had started a ritual in our bi-weekly one-on-one meetings of starting with sharing our progress with each other. He is building a work table, and had finished reading a book on woodworking whose philosophy was that modern woes can be mostly cured by doing things yourself and not being afraid to experiment. In one chapter, the author asks the question “can you microwave wood to dry it out?” and then walks you through how he didn’t know, so he tried it out, and so-and-so was the result.
We had tweaked some of the lengths slightly from the initial design we found to match our space better. We also made the tabletop length and width match the golden ratio at my request. At this point our table was done, so we made similar tweaks to the bench designs. I was still disappointed that we couldn’t figure out the correct angles on the crossbeams earlier, so we went extra heavy on the math here, calculating the angle of the V under the bench, the space between the legs that would allow us to push the bench in, and buying exactly enough screws to finish the project, which was needless but quite funny.
This time we had the idea to paint parts of the legs and frame before connecting them to the bench top so that we didn’t need to be as careful or use any painters tape.
As a bonus, we also had exactly enough polyurethane to finish coating the two benches! To celebrate our completed table, we had our landlords over for lunch.
I consider this project an exercise in self reliance. There are a lot of difficult things that you can accomplish if you’re not afraid of trying, like starting a business, learning a new skill, or writing a musical. If you make mistakes, they might not matter, and if they do you can fix them. Even if you make a lot of mistakes you’ll probably succeed in the end, and you might still end up with something higher quality than you could have bought.
