Wood

Melissa wanted dark wood to contrast with the couch. That means, either buy expensive wood or stain cheap wood. I hate stain, so I guess it's expensive wood. I went with walnut, which is beautiful IMHO and it's domestic so it's a little cheaper than most of the exotics (plus, it smells nice when you work with it).

The coffee table legs will come from these two pieces.

The wood for the legs was easy to pick out. The rest was horrible. I love lumber yards and I hate them. I love them because of all the beautiful wood which says "take me home and build something wonderful with me!". I hate them because it's so stressful trying to determine exactly how much wood to buy and which pieces to choose. You have to have a solid plan, you have to look for twisting, cupping, cracks, knots, grain pattern, colors, interesting markings, etc.

After picking through every piece of walnut, I found the best ones and hoped I had just enough. Walnut is not the kind of wood you want to buy too much of ($!). I felt good when one of the guys working there said, "Oh, you found it, I remember that piece when I put it out". It was not easy. Apparently, large clean pieces of walnut are not that easy to come by.

When I began cutting my pieces and making hard and fast decisions about which piece to use where, I realized there was less usable wood than I had planned for. But I was so close!!

After playing around with my plans, I determined if I shortened the depth of the coffee table by 2 inches and shortened six apron pieces by 1/8 inch, I could just make it. Yikes, I hope I don't mess any pieces up. If so, I'll be back at the lumber yard.

Here are my pieces after general ripping and cutting.

Coffee Table - The Design

Now that we have our new couch,


Melissa has been threatening to buy a coffee table. I, of course, insist that I can make one better and cheaper than anything she could find. So she showed me some pictures, we discussed, customizations, materials, dimensions, and now it's time to get started.

I used Google SketchUp to design it because 2D models just won't cut it. Here is what I came up with.

The top surface is based on an awesome dining room table my brother, Brek, built. His design is ingenious. The breadboard ends are actually attached to the legs. This allows the joined panels, between the breadboards, to expand/contract freely without an over-engineered way of attaching them.

The second shelf was trickier but I think I came up with something that will also allow for seasonal changes. The bottom storage area is an idea Melissa spotted in a picture. Instead of cabinet doors, or drawers, that would need a wide swing, I'll use doors with hinges on the bottom. This way, if the user is perched between the couch and the coffee table, they will still be able to open the coffee table doors and have full access to the storage space. I think this is the most practical way to conceal storage on a coffee table, which will obviously be right next to a couch.

Pepper Grinder Completion

Okay, I've been lazy with my posts to this blog. Yes, I finally completed the second pepper grinder. Here is a picture of main body, after sanding, on the lathe.


Here is the head. This is the part you twist to grind the pepper. You can see the little tiny piece of wood still attached to the top of the head. The trick is to get this as tiny as possible without breaking it. Then you just pop it off and sand down the area by hand.

The final step is to epoxy the grinder mechanism into the body and head.


Does it work. Yes, it works great. It has room for improvement though. I'm going to put the lathe projects on hold for a bit and start working on the next project, the coffee table. See next post.