New Kitchen Table

About six weeks ago I mentioned to Marc that I would like a new kitchen table.  One of the chairs is broken (and we can't seem to repair it so it stays together) and it is light wood while everything else in our house is darker wood. It's a perfectly good table, so I wasn't really in a rush. He took me to a furniture store one night so we could get an idea of what we wanted. Then we had sticker shock. $1000+ for a table and 6 chairs. Well that wasn't in our budget anytime soon.  Well one night I was reading a blog and someone posted about a kitchen table they wanted to make.  The picture was exactly what we wanted so I clicked on the link. The next day I told Marc about it.  He checked out the website and within 45 seconds decided that he was going to make us a new table. Our new table, chairs, and a bench should end up totaling us less than $200 for all materials. Unfortunately since this was our first big project (well other than building a house - ha!) we ended up changing directions halfway through.  That cost us a little more money, but we will be using the scraped section in the basement later, so it's not a total wash.

Kayla checking out the pocket holes.

We sure do have some precious girls!

Helping Daddy put some screws in.

So this is where we were when we changed plans. The grooves between the boards were deeper than we wanted. I didn't want them to be crumb catchers, and we looked into several different ways to fill it in.  Ultimately Marc decided that it would be less work to buy some different wood that fits together flush.  It is a little more expensive, but it would be less time consuming.  He took the table top off and we will just make a new base for it to go on in the basement.  Also, when we brought it into the breakfast room to check out the stain color in the house, I started getting paranoid at how big it was. We are just putting chairs on the long sides so the table can be longer.  When we decided to make a new top we shrunk it down by about 10 inches. Right now the new table top is together and sanded. We have a little bit of a busy week, but hopefully we will stain it Friday, poly it on Saturday, and it will be in our house early next week! I'll be sure to write another post with the final product and maybe another one as Marc does the bench and chairs.  I will be upholstering cushions for the seats, and I'm looking forward to picking out some fun fabric!