A Unique Kitchen Table

This is a kitchen table I made with a number of unique features:

(1) The top is made from a recycled solid maple bench top that I purchased at the local recycle center for $4.00. I trimmed, sanded, and oiled the top with pure Tung Oil. Although I sanded it, many marks, dents, dings, scratches, drill holes, and other distress marks from years and years of use remain. These give the top a lot of character!

(2) The skirt is made of locally-harvested wormy quarter-sawn white oak. You can’t really see it in the photographs, but the worm holes in this very nice oak also add a lot of character. I stained the oak with a common Minwax stain to create a nice color contrast between the reddish stained oak and the gray bark of the “log” legs.

(3) The legs are made from a single long branch “log” of red oak that fell after a storm in the nearby woods. The four legs were initially cut roughly to length on site in the forest the old-fashioned way using an axe and then carried out of the woods in a back sack.

Although the total cost of materials for this table was minimal (under $100.00 if I don’t count purchases of additional tools), a lot of time and labor went into figuring out how to cut square mortises in the very rounded, crooked, and generally organically-shaped log legs. Note that the legs were not trimmed to final length until after I had mortised them into the side skirts, as shown in the fifth photograph.

As in any “experimental” design like this, I encountered a number of issues and imperfections. While of course I know where all the flaws and mistakes are, you just can’t see them in the final result. So I’m very happy with the result! :-)

-- “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” — Martin Luther King Jr.