Dining room Table legs

Here’s a peek into our dining room. Our whole place is a huge work-in-progress but this space finally looks pretty cute:) This is a post by my husband Aaron…

We’ve always wanted a big farmhouse style table but up until we purchased our condo a few months ago, we never had the room for one and really, I never had the ambition to build one. But since I was riding high on my moderately successful brick wall exposure project and since we now have a big open dining room, the space was begging for a big table and I knew I had the answer the call.

My last official wood shop class was in 7th grade about 21 years ago. I’ve built some random things for my job over the years but never furniture and never something that will be the centerpiece of a dining room. I had a few ideas running around in my head, but they all seemed overly complicated, so I hit the internet for some inspiration and settled on a rather simple design (we used these posts as inspiration/guidance: DIY Dining Room Table, A Story About a DIY Table, and How I Built My Own Table All By Myself). I never really intended to copy any of the designs exactly, but that’s pretty much what I did and perhaps, if you find yourself in my situation…needing a table, not wanting to buy one and possessing just enough confidence to get yourself into trouble, you’ll copy my design, which I copied from someone else. Living in an urban space and having minimal power tools and no workshop other than my patio, I knew I had to keep it simple, but most importantly, I had to keep it cheap. My goal was to see if I could build the entire table using nothing but the tools I already had and spend under 0.

So, let’s get into it.

How to Build a Dining Room Table and Bench…

Materials:

• 4 wood planks (length, width and number can vary depending on your needs)
• 4-6 2×4’s (again length will vary depending on size of your table – also used for supports under table)
• Wood screws
• Wood stain
• Polyurethane
• Brushes
• Mineral spirits
• Gloves

Tools:

• Screw driver (preferably electric)
• Sander
• Wood block planer (optional)

The Steps:

(A note from Anna: Before you start, use tape on the floor to determine the size of the table you would like. This helped us a lot when deciding how big to make the table and gave us a visual so we would know if the table size would work the way we wanted it to in the space.)

1. I started at Home Depot and selected the straightest and least warped boards I could find, which in actuality where about as warped and crooked as a 100 year old man with scoliosis. Lacking pretty much everything but a basic tool kit and a few minor power tools, I knew I wasn’t adequately equipped for major construction, so I had all my dimensions written down and had Home Depot make all my major cuts. An interesting note… it’s advertised that your first 2 cuts are free, each additional cut is .50 cents. I’ve found that even at .50 cents a cut that’s cheaper than buying unnecessary power tools. Luckily, even though I had them make about 12 cuts, I didn’t get charged.