The extra special Mr. Bill told me that there was a company called “Travertine Stone Products” on Rutland and Metric that might fit my custom stone supply needs. I called them yesterday and they said they thought they could help me so I went down there at lunch today. The woman who helped me was patient and informative and friendly and after I decided what specific kind of travertine I wanted and described the desired dimensions she said they’d get back to me with a quote. The quote was forthcoming about an hour later and it was for a price less than I had decided I was willing to pay and the estimated delivery date would be Wednesday next week which was faster than I’d expected. If the stone actually comes in and is anything like the correct size and color I will promote these people to the auspicious rank of Big Damned Heroes. With any luck the next post here will be pictures of a finished table. Cross your fingers.
Category: Woodwork
Rocks are hard
I’m sure I have mentioned the “rock” that I want for my table in here before. The idea is that there is to be a thin slab of limestone or travertine underneath the latticework in the top. The problem is that no one wants to sell me this rock. I’ve been to two different Home Depot locations because they claim to sell exactly what it is that I’m looking for. The first location was too helpful for my own good and told me that I didn’t actually want to buy a box of tiles from them. What I actually wanted to do was spend four hours on the telephone with local flooring sellers (apparently HD doesn’t qualify) trying to convince them that I should be allowed to buy a sample tile from them. The second Home Depot was much more not-helpful and actually managed to place an order for one box of 24″x24″ unfilled, honed Travertine floor tiles for me for the low, low price of $139 including tax. They said it would be in in 7 to 10 days. They said they would call me when it came in.
So, two weeks after I ordered it I’m starting to wonder where my rocks are. Since I was meeting Whitney at the greek food for dinner (Zorbas = nummy) and the HD was right across the parking lot I figured I’d wander down there and see what was the hold up. I found the guy who had placed the order for me and talked with him for a little and eventually we find out that my order had been canceled because the supplier said that rocks have been discontinued and that no one had bothered to call me to let me know that there are no more rocks. This puts my record at 0/2. I’ve been told that you only have to get a hit one in three times to make it into the hall of fame. I’ve also been told that there are a lot of flooring vendors in the Metic/Rundberg area and that I might be able to find someone that still has some rocks in stock. We’ll see. I might need to start thinking about alternatives to rocks if this keeps up.
Oh, I also had a dinner party. It went pretty well considering that I’ve never made dinner for nine people before. Bill took some pictures and put them on his Flickr page. Alex made the bestest cake ever and I’m thieving a link to the picture Bill took for my stupid blog.
Construction complete!
The construction work on the table is complete! I took some pictures today but they’re a little dark. I need to figure out a good way to photograph this thing for when I get the last two pieces. I ordered the drawer pull from the hardware hut who have an enormous selection of pulls and knobs and other goodies. It was a little expensive but it’s the one that stuck in my head. It fits the general design of the table and it’s very unique. Plus it’s organic and fluid looking on a table which is geometric so I think it’ll stand out and look good.
The stone is elusive. This could be considered irony because I can’t dig three inches down in my yard without pulling up a big limestone boulder. What I’m looking for is a piece of limestone or travertine that is 22½” x 22½” x somewhere between ¼” and ½” thick. The first thing that I thought of was floor tile. Natural stone tile comes in many sizes and materials and they have a decent catalog down at the Home Depot so I went down there. They did indeed have 24″x24″ travertine tiles (unfilled so you get the nice porous texture). However you have to order them and you have to order a box which is five tiles and $130. I think this might be worth $130 to me and then I’ll have a tile for the next table so I went to the sales lady and asked her what I needed to do to order a box. 
That was the beginning of the end. She asked what it was for and I told her (oops) and she said let’s go talk to this other lady. The other lady said I was better off calling around to local flooring suppliers (I guess HD doesn’t think they are a flooring supplier) and asking if I can buy a sample. I am really not interested in calling around for four hours trying to convince some local floorshop franchise owner that he should sell me one tile. This is why I went to the hardware store in the first place. Anyway, after having a nice long chat with the two ladies I ended up leaving the Depot without a rock or an order for a rock. Mom said she would write the guy who is making the headstone for my grandparents’ graves and see if he could make me something like what I want. The internet has been very unhelpful in this respect as well. Searching for what I want usually leads me to quarries in Australia. While I’m certain the Aussies have fine, high quality stone and stone craftsmen it’s on pretty much the opposite side of the world from where I am.
Even though there is no stone to be had I am still declaring victory. Once I get the pull in I’ll affix it and start loading the drawer up with CDs and DVDs and maybe reclaim some horizontal surface in the house. Huzzah!
Yay pictures!
It appears I’m terrible at the blogging thing. It’s for the best really. Anyway, there are pictures of the table in its almost complete state. The legs and sides are not actually permanently affixed though the legs are on there tight enough that they might as well be. Remaining tasks are gluing and finishing the lattice top, installing the drawer rails and acquiring the stone block, glass top and a drawer pull. That’s single digits! End of the year here I come!
Good and bad
Bad first. I have not had the opportunity to row since Thursday night due to my back acting up and having a full schedule all weekend besides. Tonight I was looking forward to getting back on it especially since Saturday I weighed myself for the first time since I started this and found to my shock that I am heavier than I was before. While the weight gain is probably more related to muscle building than me becoming even tubbier I still would like to actually lose some weight. So, I climbed onto the machine and after about five minutes I started feeling like I was pulling something in my inner thigh. I stopped after ten minutes and tried to stretch it out but whatever it is doesn’t want to be stretched it wants to be left alone and is willing to tell my brain that in no uncertain terms. I guess I’ll have to take it easy until it’s better. I can still do small strokes just with my back and arms but that wears me out quickly. I’ve been religious about my stretching so this is a big disappointment.
The good news is that staining is complete on the table. Huzzah! I have pictures to show of the top which are located here. Next step is the finishing and I have finally decided what I want to do for that. Oddly enough it is the least exotic of the things I’ve tried. Three coats of water based polyurethane and then sanded with 330 grit paper/sponge to smooth and #0000 steel wool to get a nice satin finish. It looks great on the sample (which does not photograph well at all so you’ll have to take my word for it unless you saw me Sunday when I was carting the thing around). I’m thinking the best course of action is to coat everything before I start worrying about rubbing out the finish so I avoid getting dust in something that’s still drying. I should also consider getting another grit of sandpaper between the 330 and the steel wool. I’ve put in for vacation the week of July 2nd to 6th which will be a nice opportunity to get this thing complete.
Short weekend
I don’t feel like I got much done this weekend but I did take some pictures so I’m putting them up. I slept until almost noon both days and only managed to drag myself out of bed to attend the noon conference call for work. Still, the drawer pieces are stained and all that remains now is to stain the top and lattice. I think I can do that in two days. It is within the realm of possibility that the table could be finished except for glass and stone this coming weekend. Of course this weekend brings both a birthday and the third Rise of Honor gathering. Though this gathering will mostly have people in attendance who are either no longer in the guild or who have not logged in to the game in several weeks or months. Perhaps there will be new life for the guild since Marty is leading for a while but there is a lot of momentum to overcome. I’ve been thinking of renewing my account once the table is finished to try to get the Netherdrake mount but that is probably a bad idea. We’ll see. Anyway, as usual pictures are located here. There are new table pics and a couple from the yard.
One more thing, I’ve tried to change the number of posts the front page shows to five. When I look at it now there are five and a link at the bottom to previous posts. I hope that worked out. It was getting a little long. 
Progress
I have spent most of my Memorial Day holiday staining table bits and reading The Golden Compass from which they are making a movie. The pieces I have stained so far are the legs, side pieces, drawer front and frame. The quality of the black from the india ink is wonderful. Looking at the pieces when they are dry I wish I could just assemble them without any finish at all. The finishes I’ve tried cover the matte of the wood and hide the nice diffuse satin reflection of the surface. I will have to consult my interwub resources to see if there is a finish that will seal in the india ink (which bleeds badly until coated with a finish) but not substantially change the surface finish. I’ve been thinking a single thin coat of a 1-lb cut of the shellac and maybe some furniture wax. We’ll see. I’m running low on ink after today so I’ll have to go brave the Hobby Lobby tomorrow to continue my work without fear of running dry in the middle of a piece. Until then enjoy the fancy new pictures.
Pretty colors
Well, almost pretty colors. I’ve set up a little area in the garage to do the staining. The work surface is a spare piece of MDF I had laying around sitting on some sawhorses and the makeshift dust barrier is a 2 mil plastic drop cloth duct taped to the ceiling. I’m sure that this will accomplish very little in terms of keeping dust off the work and will mostly just ruin the ceiling but I thought I should make some kind of effort. All of the table pieces are sanded and have been cleaned with denatured alcohol and I’ve started a stain and finish sample which you can see in the second picture. The gallery for the table pictures is here.
The sample is black on one side and red on the other and each side has been divided in half to test the two finish options I’m considering. Finish #1 is a water based, satin polyurethane which I have some minor concerns about the black india ink bleeding into. Finish #2 is a clear shellac which could end up looking very nice except that I haven’t worked with it before. I have to say that I am pleased with the way the india ink looks on the sample. It is very uniform and matte but you can still see the larger grain features and it covers very well with just one coat. The red looks weak and washed out with one coat but the second coat basically matches the color to the coffee table I stained several years ago and is vibrant red. I expect that a nice glossy finish like the shellac will look fantastic on it. I’ll play with the finishes tonight after rowing and then, provided they look decent, I’ll start staining the table pieces tomorrow. Hurray progress!
Table update
Just a quick update on the table. Sanding is almost complete. I expect another hour and a half will finish that part of the ordeal. Just the lattice and top need 180 grit to knock down the raised grain. After that the garage needs to be vacuumed a bit to get some of the dust out of the air and the pieces themselves need to be cleaned and then I’ll be ready to start staining. Probably next weekend or the one after for the first pictures of stained bits. I’m planning on staining the drawer first as it’s just big flat pieces and it uses both colors so it’ll be a little fun plus I’ll be able to hide mistakes better. Still on target for 2009.
I am the sword of Ronard!
Wikipedia does not have a listing for end table and does not mention them in the body of the text for the entry for Table (furniture). As a result I will have to link to a different source for an end table definition for the edification of the random internet hobos that pass through here. The key thing to remember is that end tables are not the same thing as nightstands. As we have learned from the Song of the Sorcelator, nightstands are much more dangerous and caution is recommended in both construction and use. Rather than consort with dark’st powers I have decided to construct an end table to teach myself some wood working basics. The ultimate goal is to learn skills enough to fabricate a set of built-in bookshelves for my study. This project is so far about a year and a half in the making and has not yet witnessed the cutting of the first book shelf board.
The primary reason for the abject lack of progress is the year and a half that I spent playing World of Warcraft. The game is
wonderful and magical and allows its subscribers fantastic entertainment and money saving opportunities via powerful, addictive feedback mechanisms. If you are playing the video game five to six hours a night and more on the weekend there isn’t much chance you’re going to pop down to the Home Despot and pick up a few sheets of plywood or spend an evening downtown with your friends trading your credit card for fire water and lung cancer. Of course eventually your friends will stop calling you and your bookshelves will never get made and you’ll just sit at the computer you moved into the living room pretending to be an elf while the world passes you by. The game is not, however, a perfect prison. The critical flaw is that it causes you to interact with other people who also play the game and it is this interaction with other WoW players that enables escape. There are a lot of really awful people on the internet and a sizable percentage of them are logged into WoW right now. At some point you have had alls you can stand and you can’t stands no more and then you stumble, blinking and swearing into the Big Room and wonder who killed your yard.
So, end table. I bought a new couch at some point during my vacation from the real world and I would like to have some other living room furniture to go with it. One of my innumerable character flaws is that I will imagine a piece of furniture or a decoration or some other object and then be unable to buy something to fill the space because nothing perfectly matches the idea in my head. An end table is a relatively simple thing to draw up and should then be easy to construct from the plans so the thought goes, “Why couldn’t I just build exactly what I want?”
I sketched a few design ideas, came up with one I liked and then drew up a plan. It’s probably not going to be the sturdiest thing in the world when it’s done. There are several joins that are not as strong as they really should be but it is pleasing to the eye and I am capable of making all the parts with the equipment which I currently own. After I drew the schematic I determined what different pieces made up each component and made a cutting diagram and a materials list and went shopping. It was about $150 in wood and I’ve since spent probably another $100 in sand paper, stain, finish, and other odds and ends. All told I’ll likely have $300 invested in it. A nice hardwood table would probably be in that price range so I haven’t screwed myself too badly apart from the substantial time investment.
The current state of the project is that all of the pieces have been cut and have had the joins dry fit together and it seems to be an actual table which could conceivably hold up more than its own weight. I have some pictures of the complete dry fit test here. I got the coppermine gallery software installed so now everything can be hosted here and you don’t have to wade through a bunch of flash ads about refinancing your house to see stuff.
Since then I have glued up the individual legs, side panels and the top (and started rowing, also a big time investment, see below). The riser the top sits on and the lattice work is not yet glued. I will probably wait to glue the lattice until each piece is sanded and stained to prevent the nightmare that it would be to work on after gluing. I’ve also done the first sanding pass on two of the side panels. I’ll need to run the legs through the saw one last time to square off any irregularities arising from the gluing and then they’ll be sanded too. They should be easier to sand than the panels too as they’re basically just blocks.
- To do list:
- Glue tabs into top
- Glue riser (make sure it is square)
- Drill pilot holes in top, plywood and riser for screws later
- Square table legs on saw
- Sand side panels
- Sand table legs
- Sand plywood pieces
- Sand top
- Sand lattice pieces
- Sand top trim
- Sand riser
- Sand drawer parts
- Stain legs – India ink black
- Stain sides – India ink black
- Stain plywood – India ink black
- Stain top – India ink black
- Stain lattice pieces – India ink black
- Stain drawer front – India ink black
- Stain drawer slides – India ink black
- Stain drawer sides, back, bottom – China red (matches coffee table)
- Stain top trim – China red
- Glue legs, plywood and side panels together to form table base
- Glue drawer together
- Glue lattice
- Glue in top trim
- Finish table base
- Finish table top
- Finish riser
- Finish lattice
- Finish drawer
- Finish drawer slides
- Screw riser to table base
- Screw table top to riser
- Buy 22.5″ X 22.5″ travertine tile/rock slab and insert into table top
- Insert lattice
- Buy 22.75″ X 22.75″ glass stop and insert into table top
- Enjoy
- Sand parts
- Stain parts
- Finish parts
As you can see much remains to be done. Any one of these pieces of work could take several hours to complete and few of them can be done in parallel by me alone. I figure it will be done sometime in 2009. My plan is to update this place with more pictures as soon as anything picture worthy happens. Unfortunately the first thing that will be substantially visually different from what currently exists will be the staining stage and that is still a little ways off. The encouraging thing is that it doesn’t seem to be a horrible piece of shit yet and that with care in the finishing stage it might actually look nice in the living room. Wish me luck :D
– Eric