Building My First Piece of Furniture

When I started in this hobby I knew one day I'd make a table top. I wasn't sure when and I thought for sure it would be far down the line. Everything I've seen or read suggests that making a table top is difficult. The pieces are huge, they're hard to keep flat, glue up is tough as you don't want to introduce any bows in the table. There's quite a bit to think about. Since this is the largest project I've ever made it did take a long time. Lots of firsts with this project that I'm very proud of. I hope that the piece will be a valued addition to our home for many years to come. We'll see how long it lasts and if the kids can keep from destroying it for a few years...

Building A Table Top

I started the project with building the case and legs. That was fairly simple as it was all construction I'd dealt with before. Once that was done I moved onto constructing the table top. I buy rough lumber. So I have to spend some time getting flat straight boards. I use a jointer to get a flat face and a square edge, and then plane the other face flat and rip a straight edge on the opposite side of my square edge. All that to say, that's how you yield straight flat lumber. I struggled in my little garage to run the 7' boards through my benchtop jointer. It took me several weeks with the holidays to work out exactly how to manage this process. Ultimately I was able to get one pass completed on the face of the boards using some work support on each end of the jointer. Once I had that I cut a straight line on one edge by joining the boards to a straight piece of pine I purchased at a big box store. Planing and squaring the other edge was pretty straight forward then.

Getting a flat glue up on 7 boards to make the top was the next challenge. I tried to use dowels to keep the glue up square originally but i honestly had a difficult time to get the joints hammered together with the dowels. With that I needed to find another way to help with a flat glue up. I came across a video that helped me understand the methodology of mating faces of boards. I ended up cutting one side of a board on the right side of my table saw and the other mating face on the left side. This allows for any error on my table saw away from square would be compensated for on the other end of the board. This helped tremendously and got the straight glue up needed. I ended up gluing the boards together in sections, repeating the table saw cuts, and then glued the laminated pieces together to make the final table top.

I had a few boards that had some knots in them. I don't mind having the knots show in the finish piece and actually think they came together pretty well. In order to fill I these knots I had to use epoxy. Again, another first for me with this project. it actually ended up being pretty simple. The epoxy cured overnight and I had a nice filled knot to ensure I didn't have any holes in the table top.

Making Cabinet Doors

Once the table top was completed I moved to work to finish the base. One side of the table is shelving and the other side is a cabinet base. I had never made cabinet doors before and preferred the shaker style cabinet doors that are trendy these days. A quick tutorial online and I was able to whip up the doors fairly quickly. I would use more glue on my next set of doors to ensure the gaps were properly filled so they didn't show as badly after painting but they still turned out very nice.

All in all I am beyond thrilled with how this turned out. The family loves it, the guinea pig we keep seems to be more active than she was when she was on the floor, and it's a beautiful piece that we hopefully can get a lot of use out of for many years. Not only that but it has given me some confidence to attempt other larger projects and get outside my comfort zone a bit. Ended up coming together extremely well.

Cheers, and thanks for reading.

- Dale