Tabled Motion

Over the summer one year between university terms, I made a table out of maple. Aside from a full-length crack acquired during its stay in a Phoenix garage a few years ago, it has borne the years well enough that we still have it. However, when I created it I made an error in measurement. I made the height of the tabletop from the floor thirty inches. Standard height is between twenty-eight and twenty-eight and a half inches. Mine was one and a half inches too high.

Insignificant, you might say. And I would reply, Au contraire! One and a half inches felt too high when you sat at this table: to eat, play cards, work on projects, and do homework. So uniform are the tables I've used throughout my life that every time I sat at it, I felt the difference in my elbows, shoulders, and hands. And when we put it together with another table for large dinner parties, the salt shaker would fall over the edge onto the lower table. Very embarrassing. And very annoying on the whole.

(This is, in fact, not its only design flaw. Well, to be honest, a master carpenter could probably point out hundreds of design flaws. But the second flaw that jumps to mind is my choice to cut so much off the corners of an otherwise rectangular table. I should have clipped just a little off those corners; instead I produced an almost regular octagon. Poor choice.)

Until now, I've been too lazy to do anything about the height problem. But a certain convergence of the planets, rearranging of furniture for Christmas, and coincident need to go to the wood shop conspired to allow the remedy to come at last.

Here's the underbelly of my college break experiment, with legs removed and pegs visible in the sleeves:

Here are the legs, newly cut, sanded, and about to receive a dose of oil--because I didn't want to wait for urethane to dry before reassembling the table:

Here's the table serving as a staging area for all the tools I used in the most recent doorknob project:

And here it is in its latest destination, serving as sewing table for Sara in her candle room:

Looks like we've taught this old dog a new trick. We'll let it stick around a while longer.

~emrys