I think my favourite woodworking project is the table.
The people who know me probably already suspected that. I have made a lot of tables, ranging in size from the tiniest candle-stand to a big dining table. To an extent, I am always somewhat satisfied with them but also dissatisfied. It’s hard to characterize what exactly the problem is but it seems that the latest table is just never quite right. But such is the way with almost anything. Time, above anything else, will not only bring out any inherent weakness, but also any strength or value.

Well over ten years ago, I was going to have a bunch of relatives over for Christmas dinner. My table at the time was a 36 inch wide square, Formica-covered, chrome-pipe-legged, scarred veritable antique with a couple of matching chairs. I couldn’t reasonably expect 6 adults and 8 kids to sit around it.
I decided I would make a table as quickly as I could that was big enough to accommodate all those people. So I went out and bought a number of pine boards: four-foot long 1x10s, some 1x4s, and some 2x4s for legs. I was in a hurry and didn’t actually have any real tools at my disposal at the time. I lived in an apartment and had few tools. The majority of the tools I did have were actually at a job site and I was on vacation. I did, however, have a handsaw, a hammer, and a battery-powered drill.

I spent a day and knocked all my wood together into a table that was 4 feet wide and six feet long. The legs were tapered, made from clear 2×4 pine that I cut with the handsaw, and attached to the top with millwork clips. I glued all the boards together but, without any clamps, I glued and screwed 1x4s to the underside of the top to keep it together. I know all of this is not acceptable practice, but I was in a hurry. I sanded it down and coated it with water-based urethane and it was shiny and imposing by the time it was needed.
It certainly served its purpose. It fed all those people. Everyone had space to sit around it. And, altogether, it didn’t look that bad.

Seven years later, it was still serving food.
I meant to “upgrade” and make myself a better table but it’s difficult to justify it when you’re already busy and you already have something that does what it needs to do. It wasn’t quite what you’d call “good,” though. After a while, it started to rock and sway as the method of attaching the legs began to fail (three half-inch screws into the top through angle-clips on the tops of the legs). The table was a bit too tall. The boards started to shrink almost immediately and gaps opened up in the joints. They had been glued but, without clamping force, the glue did almost nothing. The cross-grain attached 1x4s underneath only served to encourage cracks to open up mid-board. And the pine suffered innumerable dings and dents from the abuse issued by my kids.

Eventually, however, it was time for it to go. I made a solid trestle table to replace it. I removed the legs of the old table and dumped the whole thing on my woodpile in my workshop.
It stayed there, untouched, for over a year. I was constantly moving it out of the way to get other pieces of useful wood. I wanted to cut it up and burn it but couldn’t. Truthfully, it had become of sentimental value.

So, I decided to reuse it. I remade it into a little two-drawer desk modeled after an English server I saw on an episode of New Yankee Workshop. It took a lot of work to get the wood bare without a thickness planer. I had to smash apart the top and rip all the boards to get rid of the majority of the splits (although I kept some very fine ones in the top). I retapered the legs to make their profile a bit better and assembled the body of the desk with mortise and tenon joinery. I even made the drawer-bottoms out of quarter-inch resawn pine from the original table. I didn’t attempt to get rid of all the dings in the wood. I didn’t fill screw-holes that were in the legs. I wanted it to be a complete rebirth of the table, but better-made and somewhat useful.

I was very pleased with the results, although some people may find the proportions a bit weird. Some people may find the defects in the wood a bit unpleasant. But I wanted the original table, with its history, to remain intact in its reincarnation. Perhaps I am overly sentimental. But I’ve never been one for seeking perfection in the things I do. I prefer for them to be useful or meaningful or, preferably, both. And everything has a natural lifespan, but that doesn’t mean you can’t salvage something from it and make something new