Kitchen Table

One fine winters day my wife approached me and said she never got an opportunity to pick out her own kitchen table -- which is true -- we have been using a table from the '50s that my grandmother had.   So we looked around for a while and found some designes that she liked when I decided we could get exactly what we wanted if I built it -- and maybe at a reasonable cost.   I started with the basic design from Rogue Engineer.    I substituted 8 quarter soft maple for the 2x6" pine they used, so the table cost considerably more.  But since my  kitchen cabinets were maple, I thought this would be more complementary.   The frame is constructed from pre-fab legs (notice they are square carved and not turned on a lathe) and pine stretchers.  I didn't use a brush on the paint, but instead used 2 cans of rattle can satin white.   Easy peasy.   Outside of  painting the frame and legs in the middle of winter, the build only took the weekend.

So the maple was planed down and a round-over bit used to get the style of the tabletop right.   The Rogue Engineer used the Kreg fastener system for everything but I used a biscuit jointer for the table top and limited my screws to the stretcher and leg assemblies.  

We have a really small dining area and chairs tend to hit the wall and damage the millwork around the window there so I made a matching bench.   The top is also maple but I cut it a bit narrower and planed it down a bit thinner to get proportions correct.   I couldn't find smaller square carved legs so I used 2" square maple left over from the table top and cut a small taper on two sides of each leg.    Also, since the bench will get moved on and sat on frequently, I added some surface mount corner brackets for table aprons off of Amazon for added strength.

Final look in our dining area.   No it wasn't winter, but actually spring time, despite the snow cover!