This project started out seeming simple in scope and execution, but turned out to be far more challenging than expected. From materials selection to the finishing process, building this farm table to replace an older (failed) build was an exercise in patience, perseverance, and learning from the material.
A while back we incorporated our dining room into a new kitchen design. We sold our beautiful dining table and chairs. A short time later we added a 3-season room and part of that design included space for a new table and chairs- furniture designed to withstand the rigors of the environment. The room is not air conditioned. In the wintertime we warm the room with a woodstove when we use it, so temps can swing from 20 to 70 and back to 20 in cycles as brief as 24 hours. Put simply, the temperature changes are as bad as they can be for wood in North Carolina. Building furniture for a room like ours is a challenge, especially a big tabletop you hope will stay flat.
On my first attempt I ended up with a well-made table that was too small, with too thin a top, and a bad finish.
The decision to make the table smallish had to do with how much space the table occupies for the 362 (+/-) days a year it serves no purpose. Every inch the table occupies is an inch of space we can’t use for other activities, like dancing. Put simply, the damned thing was destined to be in the way almost every day of its life. Nevertheless, I couldn’t see remaking it the same size. The new one seats 8 in relative comfort.
The old top came out too thin because I didn’t start with thick enough stock to mill out all the curves, cups and twists over a 6’ board with enough left for the top to appear proportionate to the beefy trestle base. I started with 5/4 and ended up with 7/8” of straight material. The new top is 1 ¼, and looks much better.
For the old top I figured I needed a finish that was easy to refresh given the harsh environment. Poly, a standard go-to for tabletops, was out. Too hard to repair. Plus, this top will never see hard use. Plus, it will not be rendered bad-looking with a little wear. I figured a few quick wipes of Boiled Linseed Oil would put me in business… except that it stayed tacky from Day 1. What a mess.
My last note about the old top is how much it moved seasonally. I never dreamed it would grow in width almost a half inch the first summer. The breadboard ends tell the story. It has never shrunk back to its original width. We could hear it expanding and contracting… little oak earthquakes when the tension overcame the friction in the breadboard tenons or the sliding dovetails that held it to the base. POP! It’s a conversation piece, explaining to shocked guests where the noise is coming from. Plus, I like knowing my engineering efforts are working. The top stayed dead flat despite its modest thickness and substantial movement. Still, I knew I could do better. My new top has the freedom to move massively without changing the appearance. If it makes noise, that’s fine.
The base is strong in design and construction. The wedges are authentic, and they are holding the stretcher firmly in place. The table top is attached to the base by a spline of sorts that fits into the tabletop on a sliding dovetail and into the trestle base in a mortise that runs the width of the base, secured with screws. The spline was permanently captured in the sliding dovetail when the table top was glued up- a clever way to conceal it, I think. My sole complaint about the trestle was the color. I used a color we have in other areas of the house and it looks terrific. I am still shocked how poorly the color transferred to this table. Truly horrific. I will repurpose the trestle without modification except to lengthen the stretcher and repaint it black.
That’s all about how I got to where I am. All I must do is make a new table top and paint the base. Simple, right? I underestimated the challenge for a number of reasons.
I made an unconventional choice for materials. I stumbled onto a stack of reclaimed heart pine at the Habitat ReStore. These massive planks (8/4 X 10”, 10 feet long) were harvested from an old cotton mill somewhere in North Carolina. They are decades old, maybe even a century. I bought 5 planks and stored them for a couple years in the environment where they will reside permanently as a table top.
They are rough-sawn, straight from the sawmill. They are dirty. They are cupped, curved and twisted. They have nail holes on one edge (and a few well-hidden nails). I had to decide how much to refine them; whether to mill and finish them or leave them rough and make the top more primitive. I decided they had to be flat for breadboard ends and sliding dovetails to work. That meant exposing fresh wood on 4 sides, so primitive they will not be.
Dimensioning this material was not easy. It’s way too big for my jointer. I had the killer idea of flattening these on my drum sander. One pass ruined a $10 roll of sandpaper and showed me how much pitch this wood holds. My shop smells like turpentine every time I touch this stuff. I am reminded I live in the Tar Heel state.
After the drum sander fail, it was clear that my only option was to flatten one side by hand using straight edges and winding sticks, a scrub plane and a jack plane. This was manly work.
Once a face was flattened by hand, I flattened the other face with the planer. It was a big job for the planer, but a great opportunity to finish off an old set of knives. And finish them off I did.
Fortunately, I only had to hand-flatten one board on one face. I used my planer to flatten the opposing face. I was able to use the planer to straighten all the other boards, setting it up to work as both a jointer and planer. This is a process I will remember because it will work every time I’m milling stock too big for my jointer.
My one flat and straight board doubled as a sled big enough to support the other boards through the planer. Lots of articles have been written on using a sled to turn a planer into a jointer, so I’ll dispense with most of the details. It is a heavy, awkward operation with stock this big, but it is safe and much faster than handwork. In about the time it took to flatten one face, all the 4 other boards were made flat.
I made the breadboard ends next. The process is pretty straight forward. Mill them to size in the usual way. Mill a pocket groove down the center on the table saw with a dado stack. Make multiple passes to establish the final depth instead of making one deep cut. The groove is long enough to house a tenon across all 4 tabletop boards but short enough to conceal tenons on the ends. Chisel out the material left round by the dado stack.
Next is to make the breadboard tenons and bring the top to final length. I learned to make the end cuts on a big project like this using a saddle and a circular saw. I think I read about it in an article about making benchtops. The saddle is custom made to fit the project, slid over each end and positioned to establish the cut line (accounting for the offset of the circular saw). Set the depth to leave the tenon thickness as you want it. Zip around the saddle, change ends and repeat. I saved the saddle to use as a guide when routing out the sliding dovetails on the bottom for mounting to the trestle.
The circular saw establishes the tenon shoulders. The remainder of the tenons were made by chiseling of the bulk of the waste and refining the tenon sides with a router. The width of the tenons is not critical and it was a simple matter to saw them free by hand.
I secured the breadboard ends to each of the tabletop planks with a single, ½” counterbored peg. I centered the peg on the two middle planks and cheated the peg to the outside of the edge boards so that as much movement as possible would occur within the dimensions of the breadboard ends. I left a full ¼” between each plank, and I’m hopeful that’s enough. That’s a cumulative ¾” of allowance for movement, and even though I assembled this in the dry winter, I feel optimistic about the summer.
The old table was small enough that I held the top flat with just two sliding dovetails and the breadboard ends. I am nervous about how this material is going to behave, so I routed 5 dovetail slots across the bottom of the planks, two of which double as tenons captured in mortises in the trestle tops.
Finishing heart pine was an adventure. The process was experimental, and I had to find my way to where I wanted to be. The reason it was an adventure boils down to this: Pitch.
Sticky, stinky pitch. This wood couldn’t be sanded- AT ALL. One stroke and the paper would load up with corns. I read an article about finishing wood with fire and I decided long before I started this build that I wanted to try it on this table. Good thing, because it’s about the only option available with wood this sappy. (http://www.finewoodworking.com/2007/01/01/an-exploration-in-finishing)
My project did not come out like the one in the magazine article. Why not? Again- pitch. When I put fire to this wood, pitch erupted to the surface and boiled, then ignited and smoked like the Marlboro Man. When I blew the fire out and the pitch cooled, my planks were crusted with something like amber. The heartwood could not be charred. Only the growth rings would take a char. The wood was teaching me how it wanted to be finished- teaching me to explore options.
I charred my planks twice. After the first char I used a wire brush to clean out the burnt soft wood, leaving the harder growth rings proud. After the second char I removed the burnt soft wood with a softer plastic brush, leaving a nice finish. I realized that I was approaching the look and feel of wood that had been touched repeatedly over eons, like a handrail in a medieval castle. It felt good.
I worked the surface with Greenies and steel wool (they didn’t load up) until the surface felt silky and ancient. Then I wiped everything down with mineral spirits in preparation for some sort of topcoat, and WHAM! Disaster! The mineral spirits drew a whole new layer of pitch to the surface. I had to char and scrub and polish my way back to a silky surface.
That debacle informed me that solvent-based finishes were off limits. What did that leave? I thought long and hard about bare wood, or maybe just wax. I imagined a guest spilling red wine and the panic that would ensue (not by me, but by the guest). I decided I needed some protection, even if it wasn’t bullet-proof.
I tried shellac and it didn’t pull up the pitch. But I’ve never liked the gumball shiny surface left by shellac. Plus, with all the texture left from charring and scrubbing, I had an application challenge. I took a shot at French polishing these boards and it worked great- except that it was too shiny and too formal for a farm table. To blunt the sheen, I took a cheap paint brush and bound the bristles into a tight, stiff-but-still-soft bunch with a rubber band. I picked up a tiny bit of the oil I used for the polishing on the bristles and dabbed the brush in 0000 pumice powder. I swiped and swirled and sashayed all over the table, taking care not to establish a pattern. Using a brush allowed me to “rub out” the finish over the uneven surface. I got a stunning satin finish with the feel of French polish, rolling over all the undulations and textures of the charred finish. It’s a party for the fingers and the eyes. It may not be as durable as poly, but it is beautiful, it did not pull pitch to the surface, it is easily repairable, and it is tough enough for my needs.
I added about 18” to the length of the trestle stretcher. I made sure the stretcher would be the right size by dry-fitting the trestle ends onto the underside of the table on their tenons and cutting a reference stick to fit exactly between the trestles. I used the reference stick to make sure my “stretched” stretcher was exactly the right length shoulder-to-shoulder. I stretched the stretcher by cutting it in half and then cutting a deep groove along about 20” of the edges and across the cut ends. I milled tenon material to bridge the cut ends into new material, and then slipped what I would describe as a long, loose tenon into the grooves on the edges. I left the loose tenons about ½ proud for strength and rounded the ends so they look like a design element and not a modification. I planed the stretcher and filled the joints and grain until the new material in the middle disappeared.
The trestle went back together with the old wedges and having made the new stretcher to fit the new tabletop, the top dropped right into the trestle mortises where I secured it with a few screws.
I sprayed the trestle with black lacquer and a satin lacquer clear coat. I like the way it came out and I love the black-and-tan effect with the tabletop.
I’m excited to host a dinner party now! I can’t wait to see the reaction of my guests to the textures, patterns, and surface feel of this new table. I think it will be a topic of interest, and when I get tired of hosting and want everyone to go home, I’ll just start explaining how I made it!
Over time we found ourselves making fewer and fewer modifications to our design, an indication that we were getting close to a final decision. One last burst of creativity resulted in changing the L-shaped perimeter to a rectangle by bringing the cold wall out even with a pre-existing and immoveable pantry, creating a new walk-in pantry behind the cold wall and allowing for the existing pantry to serve as appliance storage. This was based on a photo I found on Pinterest, and was one of the design decisions that resulted in more than its fair share of angst. It was a big decision and it was made relatively last-minute, without going through the test-of-time revisions process of similar big decisions. Furthermore, I wasn’t altogether certain how to execute it. Introducing a new wall into my down-to-the-inch design had the potential of knocking down dominoes I had worked very hard to place.
I’m writing this series of posts to document what went into our 2015 kitchen remodel. I don’t suffer from delusions of grandeur or a particularly acute case of narcissism. I just want to make sure anyone who shares an interest in projects like this gets an opportunity to understand what we did, why we did it and how we did it. This is one of our bigger undertakings for a number of reasons and if you are reading this, you must appreciate what it takes to get through a project like this one. This is for you.
We purchased a 20+ year-old house with lots of features we like and a fairly terrible kitchen. Based on a typical U-shape, the builder managed to place everything- the fridge, range, sink and prep space- badly. Here’s the arrangement from left to right around the U: Beginning on the left, the fridge. The advantage of being at the top of the U is that appliances of just about any width will fit. That’s the only advantage. Next to the fridge (I mean touching it) was the range. This was a terrible arrangement for many reasons, only one of which was that the range was flanked by a wall (the side of the fridge). The fridge and range made up the entire left side of the U.
Next to the range, at the bottom of the U, was 24” of counter space just to the left of the kitchen sink. On the right side of the sink, and completing the bottom of the U, was another 24” of counter space under which resided the dishwasher. Next came the right side of the U- a 6 foot by 3 ½ foot peninsula poking out into the room. This peninsula was, no doubt, intended as prep space, but it was about 7 feet from the fridge and the range. Running back and forth across the kitchen was wearisome. As a practical matter, the entire usable kitchen was limited to the space from the fridge to the sink. That included a meager 24” of countertop prep space.