Wood Plank and Black Pipe Dining Table

It’s finished!!!

OK maybe not completely, but as much as I can do for now.  The hold-up of course was the fact that the temperature dropped right around the time I finished the base and needed to spray paint it.  Sure I suppose I could always just leave it as is.  I mean I’m painting black pipes black so it already seems like a redundant step.  I just feel like it would look better if the whole base got a good coat of flat black paint so it was more uniform.  I also struggled with removing the price stickers from the pipes – I mean those things are like GLUED on there – and figured I would just take the lazy man…er woman’s approach and paint over it.  And one of the big rules with spray paint (besides to always work outdoors) is that the temperature must be above 40 degrees.  Seeing as it was around 30 when I woke up this morning… spray painting really isn’t an option for another month or so.  I guess that gives me some time to break out the Goo Gone and scraper doesn’t it?  I should probably also look into straightening the legs a bit.

Until I paint the base, I can’t attach the 2 2×4″ supports. And until I attach the supports, I can’t attach the top.  So right now, while it all looks like it’s finished, a good shove could make the whole thing topple over.  But we won’t dwell on that.  That’s kind of that great thing about this stage in my life… things can remain unfinished indefinitely.  We’re beyond the possibility of a flip cup tournament destroying this precariously balanced work of perfection and we’re definitely not at the little kids running around and bumping into things stage.  Phew!  So until the Spring, this is just how it’s going to have to be.  Doesn’t mean I can’t go ahead and start finishing up the rest of the room with chairs, curtains, and a fresh coat of paint!

I realized the other day that in my last post about the table, I never gave you all the full plans of how it was all going to come together.  So allow me to elaborate…

My inspiration of course came from a combination of two sources.  I fell in love with the closet shelving in DIYDiva’s Memorial House.

Source: DIYDiva

I mean… it’s gorgeous.  What’s not to love?  But living in rental apartments doesn’t exactly give me the freedom to build such awesome shelving in my closets.  Oh hello, white wire shelves… how I loathe thee.

Wanting to build my own dining room table for the new apartment and considering a full farmhouse table design, I stumbled upon this from marybicycles.

Source: marybicycles

Then it all started to come together.  I used the same plans for the pipe base – only altering the width.  I used 4 10″ pipes rather than 8″ pipes to add an extra 4″ to the width since I wasn’t limited by a big thin slab of butcher block that they were.  Since I would be building my own table top, I wanted it to be a little wider.  Here’s the basic structure of the pipe base (I apologize for my 5-year old quality MS Paint skills):

After that, I needed to attach 2 2×4″ boards to the top flanges to support the boards that would make the top.

My original plan was to nail a bunch of 1×6″ boards to the supports and call it a day, but my Papa, who has done more woodworking in his life than I can count on my fingers and toes, brought up the concern about wood expansion.  Not wanting the boards to split when they expanded, I went out and bought a pocket hole kit and bore holes through the boards so that the boards would all be screwed to each other and then the whole table top would be attached to the supports by the middle board with L-brackets or some other way (I’ve thought of a million possibilities but this seems the easiest) looking hopefully like this:

You have to admit though…. despite my terrible paint skills, it’s pretty darn close to the real thing. No?