A Base to Successful Marriages

My wife asks for few things. Very few things. In fact, on the subject of furniture projects, she has only asked for one thing: a dining room table. Two years ago (technically it’s closer to three – ref. The Big Reno), we agreed to let the contractors do the vast majority of the project but we’d put our mark on the final touches. One of those final touches was to build a table to share both our family meals and holiday celebrations. My mind began to tackle this in earnest.

With the construction chaos at it’s peak, I dragged my on-her-way-to-sainthood wife to my favorite lumber yard (about an hour away) to make sure she liked the look of these two massive 24″ walnut slabs I’d spotted about a year prior. The photo below is from an older post (circa July 2014) and shows one of the two 8′ long slabs from the same tree.

8′ x 24″ piece of choice walnut

She said she liked them well enough and helped me put them into the van. She also helped me schlep them into the basement to acclimate. By the time October 2017 rolled around, I knew they’d acclimated long enough. That’s when I uncovered them from the bottom of the wood pile and started planning my first cuts.

But before I get to that I want to explain myself. Despite all the normal excuses like other projects, work, family life, etc., my delay wasn’t caused by any of those reasons. The walnut had spoken to me and although the top was going to be challenging, it was simply going to feature these two gorgeous works of nature. My major hang up stemmed from an inability to figured out the table’s base configuration. It sounds crazy but it’s completely true. I struggled for months on end to convey what I wanted. I took a design class with George Walker, sketched poorly but often, sought professional advice (thanks Tom), took endless pictures, and scoured Pinterest.

Sketchy sketches

Too Boxy

Closer but not enough detail…or perspective

My wife, unlike me, is a deeply visual learner. She needs to see things laid out in their final configuration to fully grasp and make a decision. She is also quite exacting, which puts me in a quandary because I’m a broad-brush, it-looks-close-enough sort of person. I felt stuck until a conversation with my buddy Brian a few months ago. He knew I was planning to use painted poplar for the base. While lamented to him about my analysis paralysis he said something to the effect of “do you think the world is running out of primo 8/4 poplar?” I laughed and immediately felt the weight of this design lift off my chest. Later that night I told my wife I was just going to build the base and if we hated it I’d just burn it and make a new one. We’d only be out about $75. #perspective

Shortly after this freeing experience I made the first few cuts on the top and sectioned out the base components into a rough configuration. Around the same time, I was unfortunately confronted with a bought of mild insomnia. While trying to put myself to sleep, I grabbed the book on my night stand. It was Nick Offerman’s latest book Good Clean Fun. Toward the end there is a modern slab table whose based jumped off the page. Now, this did nothing for my ability to fall asleep, but it did give me a moment of complete clarity. All the pieces came together and I knew what to do next.

Modern slab table from Nick Offerman’s Good Clean Fun

Stay tuned.