5 Attachment(s)
Project: Simple Ash Eating Table for Daughter's Studio Apartment
A while back, our older daughter asked for a new eating table for her studio apartment. The table she's been using for not quite five years now was a very old, white melamine Ikea table from when the company opened their first US store in Plymouth Meeting PA in the mid-1980s. It belonged to Professor Dr SWMBO before I met her and was her kitchen table in the small, basement apartment we fondly referred to as "Spider Land" at the time we found each other. Over the years it was used as a craft table, a potting table and to take up space in storage up above my old shop. But it was free when darling daughter moved to her own place. While serviceable, the proportions were not ideal for the studio apartment and she asked for a narrower and longer table; big enough for two people to eat side by side. And that's what she got.
I originally planned to make square, tapered legs and an apron and actually milled up some material for that, but we mutually decided that steel legs would be more in line with the style of other furniture already in place. The material is ash milled off our old property...a nice connection and one that sadly will be hard to repeat in the future because all the ash around here is now dead. Finish is Rubio Monocoat. I chose morning mist (grey) in anticipating getting the grey look of other furniture, but the ash was so hard that the effect wasn't close to that intent and was uneven. Given I wasn't happy, I chose to sand it back and that surprisingly resulted in a very rustic look with the grey remaining in the grain. So a second coat of "pure" went on to get a very nice look. It's different than the weathered greys in the apartment (floors, barn door and some furniture) but still works nicely. Because I'm "that way", I put a small, black resin inlay on one corner as a special feature that darling daughter really likes. So does her cat, Harry. Supposedly. LOL
While I normally post involved "how I did it" threads for my projects, I'm not going to do that here because of it ending up being just a simple slab top. There's one 20" wide board in the middle (that I actually split to be able to flatten and thickness with my FS-350 and glued back together nearly invisibly) and two narrower boards on the edges that came out of a different board. Dimensions are 1370mm (54") wide and 610mm (24") deep. Thickness is 25mm (1"). It was a nice, low-key project with a "willing customer" and an opportunity to finally use Rubio's finish.
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