It’s been a very long couple of weeks ! I took some needed vacation at the end of 2006 (mostly because IBM said I had to or I’d lose my vacation time). I’ve been talking for a long time about making something out of the bamboo flooring that was left over from when I did the great room. That was a pretty cool project but when the time comes for me to move, I won’t be taking that floor with me So for the better part of a year, I’ve been talking about building something in the workshop.

Around Thanksgiving I started to build a Mission style dining room table. I wanted a table that would comfortably seat 8. I really wanted the option to seat 12-14 but where would I keep a table that big ?!

All of the left over wood I had was dark brown (carbonized bamboo). I thought a two-tone table top would be interesting so I bought a little extra flooring in natural bamboo and got to work.

Now, I can tell you that the table design was not difficult, nor was the techniques needed to build the table. The PITA was that I chose to build the table out of flooring !! To put it into perspective, all I had to work with was a pile of prefinished 37-1/2″” x 3-1/2″ x 5/8″ boards. Everything I wanted to make, had to come out of that stock. By the time I ran all of the boards through the planer to remove the finish and the tool marks, I was down to 1/2″ planks. Of course, it took a new set of blades in the planer since I had to run about 150 boards through the planer and each board had to go through about 6 times by the time I finished with them. I also had to make 3 passes through the joiner to get a true edge. I can tell you, my entire neighborhood knew when I was planing … all 1350 passes of “BRRRRRRRRRRAP”. I was good. I waited until 9am to start and never ran it past 4pm.

Anything that was more than 3-1/2″ wide meant gluing planks together. Anything that was more than 37-1/2″ long meant gluing planks together. Anything thicker that 1/2″ meant gluing planks together. I used more than a quart of glue.

If I had not chosen bamboo flooring as my raw material, I would have saved myself a lot of work (you can read that last line over and over and over again to get the picture). I could have avoided a lot of work on the legs if only I could have bought some square bamboo (it really does exist).

I opted to take the two tone theme into the slats of the leg end braces having the outer three on either side in brown and the inner one on either side in natural (the slats go “3-1-gap-1-3″). The result is striking when I added “feet” to the legs and made them in natural as well. I also added accent corner blocks in natural to the table apron. The number of hours involved were way more than I would have imagined but the result is well worth the back aches, sawdust, splinters, toxic fumes, cold days in the shop, and the disgusted looks from Zen who had to hag out inside waiting for me to take a break and play with her or take her for a walk. (She’s oh so happy that I go back to work tomorrow and we get back to our regular routine).

Well, a picture is worth a 1000 words and in this case, showing a picture means I can get washed up and get to bed so I include the one at the start of this post …

The picture may not do the table justice or I may just be biased given all the time I spent on it I still need to find the perfect chairs but I can assure you, I’m going to BUY those ! So, the next time you stop in for dinner at my house, not only will I have made the meal, I can now say, I made the table to serve on

Happy New Year and the best of wishes to you for 2007 !

Related tangests ...   Blend in a jar   Happy birthday Harvey Firestein   "Talk Like a Pirate Day"

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