Danny and I spent a few hours at a local lumber yard. We picked out some beautiful pieces of Maple wood. They were very thick and each board was about 11 inches wide. I wanted my table to have as few pieces of wood as possible. I didn't want a bunch of 2x4s like a lot of tables have (those are beautiful too...I just wanted mine different). After picking out 4 boards, the lumberyard milled the pieces to be smooth and level. I was so excited to see that the boards would be completely flush and leave no cracks for food to fall into!
Smooth, smooth, smooth!
Danny glued the four pieces of wood together first. He waited about 24 hours for the glue to fully dry.
These are the beautiful chunky 5" table legs that I ordered online.
Next, Danny began making the apron for the table. At first, he was going to just use 4-1x4 boards, and then changed his mind and glued two pieces of wood together to make a much thicker apron. The table top is over 100 lbs, so he wanted as much support as possible.
Here is where he laid out just one of each board. He didn't take a picture when they were doubled up, but if you look closely in the rest of the pictures you can kind of see it. When making the apron, he decided to add the corner braces as well for additional support. He took the 4 legs to the lumber yard and they were gracious enough to face each leg (make one of the corners of the leg flat). This way the brace was flush up against the table leg.
Here is the apron all together. Next came my work. I stained the entire thing. It will eventually be white, but I needed stain underneath for the distressing I planned on doing.
Here you can kind of see the two boards Danny glued together to make the apron thicker.
Here was the first layer of stain on the BOTTOM of the table top. I used a wood conditioner first, especially since we picked a Maple wood. I had never worked with Maple before, and it definitely did not soak up the stain like the oak we had used in the past. I ended up doing 4 coats of stain on the top--that just shows you how slowly the wood would take the stain.
Next came the white paint. I ended up putting 3 coats of white paint on the apron. (..and yes I knocked over a can of stain on the canvas sheet...oops!)
During the painting process, I would add another coat of stain each day. Here is coat 2 on the top.
Here was my last coat of stain.
Next came distressing. Danny was willing to do this...and I didn't complain because I hate sandpaper so much!
I then put 4 coats of a clear polycrylic on both the apron and the table top. I only put one coat on the bottom of the table top.
Danny then added 5 horizontal braces (that I had stained as well) to the underside of the table. He put the 5 boards on it while the table was upside down.
A friend of his had to help carry this bad boy inside. They carried it in 2 pieces, and then Danny finished putting it together in the house. It's darn heavy!
I used the same chairs from my old table and I was excited that my staining matched them perfectly! I am also excited that because of the design of this table, we can actually fit 10 chairs around it if we need! Our last table was the EXACT same size and could only fit 8 because of how the table legs were made.
This 8 foot beauty makes my heart flutter!
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