Farmhouse Table: Easy, One Month Long Project

That's a joke up there. It shouldn't really take you a month to make a farmhouse table. And, if you are not us, it probably won't!

It's kitchen week here at Boxy Colonial. Or maybe kitchen fortnight. We've got a good bit going on in the kitchen, and I'm going to tell you all about it. Slowly. I'm going to get two whole posts out of this little table. This only makes sense after how long it took us to finish it, right?

This is the general table show off post, with a bit of background information, lots of pictures, and also the stuff about the stain and finish on it. Then Dave will write up the post about the actual table construction with a cut list and all that.

We moved our old kitchen table out to the sunroom awhile back. This was awesome for the sunroom, but left us tableless in the kitchen, which meant that not only was there nowhere to sit or eat in the kitchen, but people kept hitting their heads on the light fixture in there, what with no table to keep them from walking under it. And the light fixture happens to be very pointy.

So Dave decided to make a table (really, we knew for months that Dave was going to make a table. It didn't take getting stabbed in the head by the light fixture to remind us that we needed a kitchen table. I just told the story that way for dramatic effect).

We looked at maybe....783?....blog posts about other people's farmhouse tables, mostly riffs on Ana White plans, and then Dave came up with his version, scaled down for our kitchen. Eventually, I told him to stop trying to get me to help him decide about all the little details involving tools and wood and such, and that he should just surprise me.

And then the table looked like complete crap when he finished.

JUST KIDDING! It looks great! I love it! Dave is such a good decider!

He's going to tell you about all of that later....how we (he) decided on the size and what wood to use and how it went together. I will show you the table. And then I will tell you about the stain. Because that was my part.

My original plan, way back a long time ago, was to just ignore all the light wood in the kitchen and stain the table dark walnut. I didn't want to give it a light stain like the cabinets or the floor; I didn't want to let the cabinets and floor bully me into a finish I didn't like. But then it occurred to me that a grayish finish would work well with all the gray in our granite countertops. And I LIKE gray!

I didn't want straight up gray like we used on our foyer bench, though. I did a lot of reading and found many complicated sounding plans for homemade stain involving rusty nails and tea and eye of newt and hair from a unicorn's tail and all that sort of thing.

And then! Right before I left to hunt unicorns, Katja at Shift Ctrl Art posted about how she made a lovely barnwood colored stain by.....mixing two different colors of stain together! Brilliant! Easy! My kind of custom stain:

Custom Barnwood Stain at Shift Ctrl Art

See how I snuck in the shot that not only shows off the color, but also the lovely table setting?

My stain is not the same color because I decided to just work with the stains I already had on hand. 

I had a big thing of Cabot gray semi-transparent deck stain that my friend Kristi gave me, and I had my beloved dark walnut. All I did was pour a bunch of the gray stain into a yogurt container then slowly mix in the dark walnut, just a little bit at a time, testing it out on some scrap wood after every addition, until I got it how I wanted it. 

Then I brushed it on to the table (I did the stain back before the table was assembled, to make it a little easier), let it soak in for 20 minutes or so, and wiped it off with a rag. 

After that, we did a gazillion coats of polyurethane. Well. We did two coats on the legs and apron and four or five on the top. We went with the semi-gloss, but now I'm kind of wishing we'd gone with satin. But maybe the gloss will simmer down over time. And, anyway, water beads right up on that thing now! 

So maybe you noticed that there is a motley collection of random chairs around the table right now. Those are not staying. I am slowly collecting the permanent chairs now, and then I will do something FUN with them. And colorful. Because my kitchen is looking pretty monochromatic these days. That one brown windsor chair, with the funny part in the middle? That's the first one I've found for the table. It took about 5 thrift store trips to find the one, and I need six. Sigh.

I have TWO MORE exciting kitchen projects to share soon. And a smaller sunroom post. Also my last Disney post. SO MUCH POSTING!

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