a very simple coffee table

hello folks,

over the last week we've been making a new piece of furniture for the house.

as you may have guessed from the title of this post - it's a coffee table!

we had a big piece of ash left over (from a piece nikki and monkey boy got to make a firewood chopping block) and thought it was mighty fine and so we decided to make the table from that.

here's the piece:



we didn't want to mess with it at all and so, apart from sanding, we kept it as it was.

we then cut another piece of ash into two rectangles (from the same tree as the top) - below:



as we were thinking about how to put the thing together we decided to try and make the whole thing without using nails, screws or glue - 'old school'!

so, we shaped the two ends of the cross-section so that they'd fit into the legs.

here's how it started:



and here's how it looked when we were done with the ends:



we then cut out the holes for the cross-section to slot into:



and here it is in place:



next, we went about making wooden pegs (from - you guessed it - ash!) to hold everything in place.

here are the end pegs (and you can see one of the pegs to hold to top in place too):



then, when everything was oiled/varnished (we found a water-based eco-varnish to give the table top a longer life and oiled the rest with linseed oil), we put it all together.

finally, we added some suede to the bottom of the legs to stop any scratching of the floor and we were done!

this is the finish table:







once again, we're pretty damn pleased with the end result - another fine piece of home/hand-made furniture for our house - hell yeah!

we've got mamma kuels visiting tomorrow and plan to put her to work and so i'm sure there'll be more to tell after the weekend.

that's all for now.

gairy.