So this past weekend, we went out and bought some lumber to begin the dining room table project. Several things had to happen before we could do this though. We came up with a rough plan as Melissa mentioned in this post. Once I had the rough idea of our wood needs, we took a trip to the Home Depot. We bought two 4″ x 4″ x 96″ cedar boards and five 2″ x 4″ x 87″ white (douglas fir…) boards. We also happened to buy some plants for the front flower beds. Here was our trip home.

Melissa posted more about that here. 

The next day, we spent an hour or so in the garage talking through the exact measurements and creating a working drawing, or rather several working drawings.

Don’t worry if those seem a little hard to follow. I’ll explain as I go along. It will help to see a sketch of what sort of finished result we’re planning on (don’t judge the rough scribble sketch):

I also want to take a few lines to define some terms I will be using.

• Rip cut (ripping or ripped) –  rip cut is a cut made parallel to the wood grain, usually to cut a board to width
• Cross cut (cut) – a cross cut is a cut made perpendicular to the wood grain, usually to cut a board to length
• Planing (plane) – removing a layer of wood parrallel with the wood grain, usually to make a board thinner

Once we decided on a plan of attack (working from the ground up), I started cutting the pieces for the legs and base. After some calculations on where we wanted the legs to set, we decided we were going to have a base that was 20″ x 55″.

You may be wondering how we came up with these strange dimensions. Well for the 55″ measurement, we looked at how deep several of our chairs were, and decided that we’d like to have 20.5″ from the edge of the table top to the legs (on the short ends of the table).  This would let the chairs on either end of the table be fully pushed in when not in use.

As for the 20″ on the long sides, we found this DIY Farmhouse Table and liked how the base and top looked together, so we scaled it to fit our table. Those reasons totally make sense, don’t you think? If we’re building the table to suit our house and our chairs, why not make it totally custom?

Earlier when I said “from the ground up”, I meant work on the base first, as opposed to the table top.  But for the sake of you following along, I explain the build of the base from the top-down.

We  needed a way to hold the legs to the top of the table, so we decided to build a pseudo-apron that would be hidden under the table.

It is basically a 23″ x 58″ rectangle made from 2″ x 4″ boards.  If you take 1.5″ off each side to get to the inside measurements, that will give you the 20″ x 55″ dimensions we planned for the legs and base. Since they were going to be hidden, we didn’t spend a lot of time making these pretty. We sanded them enough to make them smooth for painting.

Next, I cut down the 2″ x 4″ boards down into 20″ pieces for the stretchers for the legs. I ripped off both of the sides of the short 2″ x 4″ stretchers to remove the rounded over corners and to get square edges.  I also pseudo-planed them to make them a little bit thinner. This planing step wasn’t really necessary, but what is done is done.

See how they no longer look like 2″ x 4″s?

 

After cutting the short stretchers, I started cutting the 55″ long, center stretcher.  I ripped both sides of it to remove the rounded corners again, but by this time realized I didn’t need to plane it down, so I skipped that step. At the bottom of the base drawing, we planned out how the stretchers would fit together.

I used the jigsaw to cut the notches out of the 3 stretchers.

 

 

The short braces (under each short side of the table) have a notch cut in the center to allow for the middle brace to fit inside.

 

The long brace (which will be centered under the table, long-ways) had two notches cut at both ends. I measured and marked those before cutting them

 

In the end, they should fit together much like pieces of a wooden block puzzle.

I moved on to cut down the legs.  We did some research online to find out the standard height of dining tables (30″). Melissa held up the end of the 8′ board while I made cuts with the chop saw.  The first thing you should do with any board is to cut the end off.  Just because it came from the store doesn’t guarantee that it will be square. See how the laser shows the “factory edge” is a little off?

Since the table top is .75″ thick, I cut the legs to be 29.25″ long.  Unfortunately, the blade on my chop saw won’t cut completely through a 4″ x 4″ board. So I cut it as far as possible the first cut, then rolled it over 180 degrees to finish the cut.

Finally, everything was rough cut, after a pretty long afternoon or planning and measuring.

We will still need to cut in the notches on the legs for short braces to fit into, but that’s a step for the next work day.

Can you see our vision for this table? Did you follow those measurements and plans at all? Have you ever built a table? Did you follow a plan or create your own?