plum tree place

Around Thanksgiving last year I made a table. I'm just getting around to blogging about it today. We are absolutely loving it. It was one of the best things I've done for our house. But it was also one of the harder projects I've worked on.

We had a very nice round table already in our dining room. It was a counter height table and did not fit the space very well.

It had also gotten too small for our family.

So I did a little research to find the perfect table for our family and house. I had followed Ana White for some time before this. Her site is the perfect place to find an awesome DIY project. She creates plans that make building easier to understand and not so overwhelming to tackle.

The original plans can be found here. We did alter those plans a little. I wanted a wider table so I made it about 50 inches wide and I made it a little shorter. Our table ended up being about 92 inches long. I followed another person that posted about this same table. She talked about it here how she left out the decorative apron and I liked the look of that better, so that is what I did too. She also talked about how she made her table wider and the changes she made to accommodate that added width.

I started with making the legs. The hardest part was the angle cuts for the bottom of the legs to achieve that rounded look. I have a terrible miter saw that won't properly lock into position, so I had to be very careful. One piece had to be cut at a 30 degree angle and the other at a 45 degree angle.

The decorative brackets were also very hard to cut out and to try to get them all the same (or at least as close to the same as I could).

I painted the legs and the stretcher board running through the legs with flat white paint and then put two coats of wax over the top of them. I distressed them a little. Previous to painting the legs I applied a dark stain along the edges where I knew I would be distressing them. After painting I sanded away the paint to reveal the dark stain. Then I waxed everything with Minwax Finishing Wax.

The top was a little harder for me to handle on my own because of the size. I used the kreg jig to connect the inside panels together. Then I did the frame around the panels and connected those with a kreg jig also.

I chose to stain the table top. I used a combination of Minwax Early American (which is what I used on my floors) and topped it with Minwax Dark Walnut. After that I sealed it was a couple coats of Poly and it was done!