farmhouse dining room design ideas
hi, welcome to the handyverse. today i'm going to use photos and some 3dmodels to show you how i made this here dining room table. stick with us. once we had our nook done, we needed a customsized table for this area. so, i looked for different plans online andi couldn't find anything that was exactly what i needed so i cobbled something togetherby myself. the top was inspired by plans i found on shanty2chic,i'll put a link to that below. they offer free plans for a full table butthe leg system wasn't what i was looking for.
what i've done is i've made what i like tocall an "expanded pedestal". we didn't want legs in the corners becausewe wanted it to be easy to get in and out of the nook. but a pedestal in the middle, i thought thetable was too big and it wouldn't be stable. what i did was take those points and spreadthem out and make it a bit more stable and this thing is as solid as a rock right nowso it worked out really well. one of the neat things about this table isthat i built it in two separate pieces and the bottom here it actually has a cradle init so you lower the top down on it and you secure it with a few screws and it holds itin place nicely.
this was necessary in this case because itwouldn't fit through the door otherwise to get it into the room. the first part of the build was building thetop. it was necessary to do the top first becausei needed to know what the top was going to be like to make sure that it would fit intothe base. i started by cutting seven of the 2x6's tolength and in my case, we needed this table top to be 58" by 36". it ended up being 36 1/4", just the way itworked out in cutting the boards. our first cuts were these seven 2x6's andsince we wanted a 58" length, and it's framed
by 2x4's around the edge, we had to take offthree inches so we have seven 55" boards. and i used a router bit to cut a groove inthe middle of each seam and i put a 1/4" piece of plywood in the middle and squeezed it togetherto make sure that these seams stayed nice and flush over time. on the back, i used a kreg jig to secure themtogether using screws. once i had all seven of those boards together,i framed it using the 2x4's so i mitered these corners to make it a bit cleaner on the finishedproduct. so you can see, we've got a nice miter oneach corner. and this was pretty tricky to frame in, andi had to get creative with my clamping.
and once i did get it in place, i only putit in temporarily because i had a problem with one corner of the table was down lower,it was twisted, it was a twist in the overall surface that i had to try and figure out away to get out. my solution to the warping was to put this"x" style brace on the back of it. using a couple of 2x4s in a cross patternand i kept the total length on one on the worst part of the twist. so, what i did was i used i used some clampsand a couple of straight 2x4's that i had and i clamped the table until it was straight,flat, and then i mounted the "x" on the back of this, on the bottom of it, with many screwsand glue.
and then once i released the clamps, thatallowed it to hold in place using this "x" brace. the way that that brace ended up kind of helpedme figure out how i was going to do the bottom, to have this join onto the base and that wasto put this here square piece in and have it cut out for the braces, obviously. and that gave me a nice box that i could useto put in the bottom piece, in the cradle. i also put these small square pieces in thecorner to help keep the edge square and in place when i took all the clamping off. and that overall gave me a nice flat tabletopsurface that has stood up over time.
so on the bottom, now that i had this squarearea, or rectangular area that i could use for my attachment points, the next thing idid was i built the two cross-pieces so there's this cross-piece which fits up underneaththe table and what i did was measure this box directly and i made this cross to fitthat space. that way, when these go up, they go just onthe outside of the box on the tabletop. so then i made this cross-piece out of some2x4s and underneath on the ends, i put a 6" piece of 1x6 that it serves to keep it upoff the floor. so, if we had this full continuous lengthon the floor, if there were any imperfections in the floor which, we're in a 55-year-oldhouse so there is, it would cause it to rock
but having these feet on the ends allows itto stay nice and stable on the floor. i screwed these together first and then icut this plane on them to make them a little fancier but then i took this piece here andi put that, actually i centered that on here, i didn't secure it on here but i set it onhere and i used it as a template to put these posts in place. so, with everything clamped together and thattop cross-piece down here, i used the kreg jig to attach these to the foot with screws. and then, once i did that, i slid this upto the height it was supposed to be at which was, you know, these are 2x4's here so 3 1/2"down and i secured these in place here.
and that gave me a really nice cradle thatyou know, really made it easy to put together once i got it in place. so that was kind of a gross over-simplificationof how i built this thing but you can get the idea by just seeing what i did here. and it's something you can do yourself, it'sa lot of work though, there's a lot of other things that go into it. a lot of sanding, especially using rough cutlumber like this. so, using 2x4's and 2x6's means that you reallyhave to do a lot of work pulling things together, squaring it up, sanding it, and making itall nice and smooth and then, of course, you
have to stain and varnish. and a table, any table, is going to be a lotof work in that regard because there's so much surface area to cover. so this was meant as kind of a quick guidelineto help you out. i am putting together plans on this so hopefullyby the time you're seeing this they are already going to be up on the website but we'll puta link to that and check in there to get the plans and if you want to build your own, certainlyask any questions and i'll do what i can to help out in the comments. so hit like, hit subscribe, and we'll seeyou in the next video.