I mentioned here about a little project that J has been working on… and even though he’s not quite finished with it, I just HAD to post about it. J worked for about 3 weeks on this table, from sketching out the design to actually working in the shop to build it.

I should start back at the beginning…

We moved into this house in December (Note: Please ignore Abigail and me standing in front of our house. This was the only picture I could find)

Anyway, this house was built in 1901 originally as a summer cottage. She (the house) is  named The Medelia, after the original owner.  We decided once we moved in to go with a British Colonial decorating scheme and we’ve been collecting ever since. With a graduate school budget, it’s been a slow process, but one that is really coming along. I promise to do a more in depth post later.

So we started by painting…

Before

After

Now we’re on to the decorating part, hence the table. I was going to write up a long post on how to make your own table, then I realized that probably without the proper tools or training, a DIY on this would not work out so hot. So I’ll just show you some snap shots of the process. The wood came from some trees around the village that had fallen and been taken to a mill. J and his dad went and retrieved them and all of the boards sat in our basement for a couple of weeks drying. I did not take pics of this because it just looked like a pile of wood in our dirty basement… you can picture what that would look like, right?

So the process…

There was preparation…

A lot of measuring…

A lot of sawing…

Some gluing…

Binding it all together so the glue sticks, then more measuring…

Then there was the spraying of the shellac, multiple coats…

And then there was a table…

(Note: Sorry about the picture quality, I’m still saving up for a fancy pants camera and then I can learn how to take fancy pants pictures, so until then, this is what you get.)

Don’t be fooled…. That “trunk” is not really a trunk, it’s a part of the table…. and I love it! People really think that he just built the lower part and that we placed a suitcase/trunk on top… we’re tricky like that!  It’s really tall so that it fits right underneath of our t.v. so that to hide our mass of media cords… The white cord is a cord that is connected to a power strip that he has mounted inside so that we only have one cord showing as opposed to like 5… he’s a smarty isn’t he? He still has some detail work to do on it, but the parts still haven’t arrived yet. For now, I am admiring how awesome this table is, the skill of my husband and the fact that it only cost us $80 total!

What do you think?