Hallway Table

Having spent about a year putting together a decent little workshop the time had come (and been long overdue) to actually start making stuff.

One of the many, many projects I had always intended to do was creat some sort of hallway table to fit a fairly large gap that resides outside our living room. I like the idea of learning to build furniture with a bit of traditional understanding, I'm nowhere near good enough with handtools (yet?) to mill wood down and knock together cabinets like Thomas Sheraton but I want to try to understand how wood moves and behaves so that I can choose the right joins in the right places.

So I looked around for some oak and picked up a load of offcuts from a local timber flooring guy, he was good enough to plane some of the wood down for me as this was before I got my hands on a mechanical planer.

The biggest challenge for me was the turning, by know my efforts on a lathe were reasonable for basic items and I reckoned that making a table leg wasn't beyond me, however making four identical table legs would be tricky...

Thank God for the Axminster lathe that I'd upgraded to, with a bit of effort and going slow I managed to produce four relatively accurate legs - I have the habbit of not planning in detail so after location the main features I let my mind wander as I make the first then have to concentrate of getting three others the same.

All in all I found the table enjoyable to make, it was the first thing I'd produced that felt like 'proper' woodwork - no nails or knotty, painted wood and enough hand tooling to make me feel like achieved something. The half-blind dovetail joints on the drawer fronts worked out about fifty/fifty for quality but after staining and varnishing they don't look too bad for a first effort.

Here it is in situ.