My First Homemade Furniture

So Pete got given a live edge slice of timber the other year and he eventually decided to do something with it. He made a picnic bench. I was impressed with it initially and then a few things started to gripe me. The first one was that he had screwed the table top to the base from above and the screw heads were visible. The proportions were wrong and the frame bolts were sticking out. However, he had by this time spiked my interest into making my own.

I had heard of a timber yard that was supposed to be magical and fantastic, it was called Barkers in Grange-over-sands. I stopped by and was ‘ooo-ing’ and ‘arr-ing’ for ages before buying 2 slabs of timber for a bargain price. Shortly afterwards I set to work making my own picnic bench.

I made the frame from recycled refrigeration pallets making sure the bolts weren’t sticking out. Hexagonal bolts were used to fix the table top to the frame and importantly the dimensions for the table were quite standard. Everything was then coated with weatherproof stuff to hopefully make it survive longer than a few weeks in the British climate.

Although I was relatively pleased with it there were a few improvements to be made. I hadn’t finished the table to its greatest finish using Pete’s excuse that ‘it was good to see the saw marks on the timber’. It was only after I had sold the table (that’s right, I sold it for £150, does that make me a professional carpenter now?) when I looked up ‘the best wood to use for outdoor furniture’. The results said Oak, Teak or Red Cedar, whereas I had actually used Sycamore. Sycamore they said, ‘would probably melt in the rain!!!’. I then looked up the best protection for outdoor timber and they said the protection I used was crap.

I would make more and would learn from my mistakes. I have for quite a while now dreamed at the potential of making a kitchen table, but given that I’m a computer guys with ‘hands that do dishes’ it has always felt quite out of reach, now, after the my first picnic bench, its feels like I could make an Ark.

(Darwin has this annoying habit that after doing something once he proclaims himself as a ‘God’ of that thing he has done once. I wonder where he gets that from?)