The Hughes': A Place to Eat

We now have a dining room table! We built it ourselves and it only took about 3 days! Here's the mastermind working up some plans for the table:

We drove around town visiting some of the local lumber yards, but decided for the cost and the type of wood we wanted to use, it was easier to go with Lowe's. It worked out great because we have one just down the road from our house. And the military discount is a nice bonus! We bought the wood we needed and headed home to start our project!

PS We decided to use Red Oak, in case you were wondering :)

The first step of constructing the base of the table was to use the router to make Dado Joints (I'm going to refer to them as slots because it's just easier to type haha!) into the table legs for the side boards to slide into (to connect the four legs into one solid piece).

You can see the table leg is the piece on the left of the picture and you can see where we made a slot on two sides of the leg for the two boards to slide into. The craziness on the right side is a contraption we created to ensure the router stayed on track and so that we made each of the slots the same exact size. It was basically a guide for the router. If you've never used a router before, it's kind of fun, but kind of scary too haha. The line can get squiggly if you don't have a guide or something to put pressure on the router to keep it straight. That's where it gets scary...one mistake and you've ruined a table leg. Those babies aren't super cheap so we weren't trying to go buy 19 legs to hopefully get four good legs we could use.

The router creates a rounded edge when it makes the slot (you can see that in the above picture) and we were wanting a squared edge so that the board could slide into it, so we used a chisel to finish off the slot.

Once we created all of the slots and then slid each of the side boards into their slots (we also added wood glue to ensure a tight hold), we had the base of the table completed!

Up next were the support beams. We wanted a little extra support underneath the table so we used the router to make those same slots down two sides of the table to insert three support beams (1"x4"x4' boards). We used more wood glue, too.

Here is a closer picture of the slots in the table leg and the slots for the support beams.

For the table top, we used eight 5.5"x61" boards and connected them to make one solid piece. I know the dimensions sound crazy, but it will make more sense later.

We used small 1"x1/4"x48" pieces of wood to conjoin the table top boards. We made slots in the sides of the table top boards to insert the small strips of wood to conjoin them. This is not easy to explain so maybe these pictures will help...

See the small pieces of wood? They will go in between each of the bigger boards (sort of like a tongue and groove kind of thing).

Below is our contraption for slotting the side of the table top boards. Again, we needed a guide for the router. The scrap pieces of wood clamped to the board are the guide for the router to stop at the exact measurements we needed it to.

Once we made all of the slots, we glued all of the boards together using the small connecting pieces. We leveled everything and tied it up so everything would be tight and straight.

Next we added on two end cap pieces (5.5"x44") to the short side of the table and two small 1.5"x6' pieces to the long side of the table to kind of trim out the table and make it look complete. We used the same method of connecting these pieces using the router, biscuits and wood glue. These pieces gave us the most trouble out of everything we did with the table. For some odd reason they all wanted to bow up and wouldn't stay level when we would use the straps to tighten the joints. But after a LOT of thinking and moving things around, we got everything to stay down and as level as possible.

The above picture shows the end caps and the trim pieces attached. We also attached the table top to the base just by simply nailing the top into the support beams and the table legs. I didn't get any pictures of this because it was so quick and easy. And because we did it right in the middle of cooking Thanksgiving Dinner so it was a quick process ;)

Next comes the fun part! Sanding, sanding and more sanding.