This week on The New Dalcher Workshop…

With your host, Norm Abram… (wear your safety glasses, or he’ll show up in your dreams!)

I have decided to build a table for my basement. This decision was mostly precipitated by the completion of my awesome workbench coupled with the choking boredom that being home by myself this week has brought to the surface.

I found plans for a medieval breakdown table, so I decided that I would spend some Christmas money on wood and materials to put this thing together. I was telling my Dad about my plans, and he reminded me that there was some 100 year old pine that he had stored that he acquired from a farmhouse in the area several years ago. He told me that if I wanted any of that I could use it and save some money. Plus this stuff costs like $10/board foot these days.

The wood itself has this neat rustic aesthetic that is going to go well in my basement. The wider boards that I plan to use for the tabletop have a notched edge that I’m going to retain as decoration on the longer sides of the tabletop. I also plan to change the plans slightly from what is listed above to make it fit the feel of my basement a little better.

So I spent this afternoon loading wood into my Dad’s truck to be taken to my grandpa’s so it could be planed and jointed (we lack a planer and jointer of our own… for now). That should be done tomorrow and then we have to glue up a few of the boards to achieve the desired length. Then the construction of the table should only take a few hours according to the plans, so I figure it’ll take us a day. Mostly because I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.

But there’s only one way to learn… plus it gives me something fun to do with Dad, which is always a good thing.