Building furniture is a DIY adventure
While the usual way of filling our homes with furniture involves going to a store and bringing home something made in a factory, there’s a case to be made for crafting at least a little furniture ourselves. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it does open up a world of experiences you can’t get any other way. Take the story of my kitchen table, for instance.
Back in the early 1990s, I built a seven-foot-long trestle table for our house using white pine. What I didn’t fully realize as a new father was how kitchen tables grow smaller as your family gets larger. Now, as friends and fiancés start crowding around the table, that old table seems positively puny.
That’s what prompted me to start building a new and larger kitchen tabletop, and the process has turned into something of a journey back in time.
The old top measures 34 by 84 inches and it’s a beautiful piece of wood that’s filled with memories of a growing family. That’s why I’ll keep the old top tucked away, ready for the day when one of the kids might take it to their own home and build their kitchen around it.
The new top I’m making will measure 45 by 98 inches, sitting on the same trestle base, but made of 1¾-inchthick cherry instead of pine. Cherry is my favourite domestic hardwood for three reasons. Besides being the perfect combination of hardness and workability, cherry turns a gorgeous reddish-brown colour in time. No staining needed. Cherry also smells sweet as you cut and plane it.
I bought my cherry recently from an old-time lumberyard I haven’t visited for 30 years. I used to buy there regularly while living in the area and building furniture to pay my way through university.
As I drove into the place this time, the yard was still filled with sheds stuffed with lumber of all kinds. I also found myself wondering about a guy named Howard.
When I was a younger customer, Howard was the older, wiser, experienced employee who knew where all the best wood was hidden. He seemed so old to me at the time, but I realize now that when I first met him, he was only 10 years older than I am today. Asking about Howard, I learned that he’s still around, living in a seniors home. His last shift at the mill happened a few years ago when he put in half a day’s work on his 90th birthday.
The cherry lumber I chose was rough, measuring a little over two inches thick. As I was choosing individual boards from the rack, I had one of those “who’d have thunk it” moments.
The last time I stood on that same spot, I was a 20-something cabinetmaker choosing cherry to make a small table for a client. What would I have thought back then if someone had told me the next time I’d be buying cherry from that mill, in that very same spot, it would be standing alongside one of my strapping-strong teenage sons who’d help me load the boards into our pickup truck, asking questions about knots and grain and lumber?
I’ve since planed it smooth and I’ll work on preparing the edges for gluing together next.
Building furniture yourself isn’t easy, and if you consider the time and tools that it takes, it doesn’t save money. So why do it? My reasons are simple: the joy of creation, the opportunity to make something that’s just right for my needs, and the chance to launch something beautiful into history. If all this sounds good, you might want to try building a little furniture yourself some day. Too few people do it.