This Space for Rent

Project of the week (if you ignore the 4 month gap in the middle of the project)

Last summer, I picked up part of a telephone cable spool from SCRAP, and decided that it would make a good tabletop for a circular table. After waffling for a couple of months about what it should look like, I finally built the table frame and started to cut out around the various mounting holes in the table so I could put some decorative pieces of glass into the middle.

This was last fall, and the season which follows fall is winter, aka "Orc gets sick for four months" season. So, aside from whining, not much got done on that project for a long long time (except for moving it when the basement flooded) until yesterday, when the bears wanted to work with clay in the basement, thus forcing me to move the cleaned up piles of junk out of the way so they could reach their workbenches. Part of those piles of junk was the table, so I decided I'd finish the silly thing off and be done with it.

A couple of hours of sanding and finishing later, here it is; a circular table made of the finest Pigs Eye oak (pine plywood, with a "oak" stain) and glass tile from SCRAP. The tabletop is a nice piece of pine plywood from a spool of telephone or electrical wire, the apron (which you can't see) is made from palletwood, and the legs (one of which is my now-signature crooked leg) are 2x2 pine that I actually bought new. The pieces of glass are grouted into the table with a tan-colo(u)red putty which actively refused the stain, but which is close enough to the "oak" stain to look like a kludge instead of a design decision (sigh. They didn't have a black wood putty at the hardware store :-()

Tonight, I'll take a picture of the glass tiles with a light shining up from under them. On one of our recent trips to SCRAP, I picked up a couple of little plastic yo-yos with led lights inside them, and if I fit one under the table (and figure out an inobtrusive way to turn the lights on and off) it will glow up through the glass in a nicely spooky manner.