The dining room table I currently have is hideous. OK, perhaps not hideous, but it is an Ikea beech table held together with the inevitable allen bolts and frankly looks as if it didn’t cost much. Correct. It didn’t. There are also some nasty chairs that go with it. I’m not going to embarrass myself by posting a photo of the thing – you’ll just have to imagine it. No offence to Ikea; you get what you pay for.
It is high time for a replacement, so I am making one with the master ébéniste, Jean-David. The design isn’t too complicated. I skulked around a few high-class furniture shops to pinch possible designs. Immediately the reason for creating your own table becomes evident: the nice ones cost around CHF 7’000, which is no small amount of money. At current exchange rates, that comes in at about £4’200 - rather more than I can afford for a table. But I am beginning to understand where the money goes.
The first thing to do is to decide what wood to make the thing out of. I have eventually decided on walnut, but I was happy to make it out of any interesting local wood which is a little out of the ordinary, which precluded pine and beech and possibly oak. If you are going to start producing a hand-made dining room table, it’s not going to be something you bin after a couple of years. Chances are you will have it until you die, if you like it, or until your house burns down. Therefore, you definitely want to make the definitive table, and that means not skimping on the wood. I hesitated with acacia, which is fabulous, or elm. Finally walnut got the nod because it is rock hard, and still not too difficult to find.
So I week ago I went wood-buying with Jean-David. This involves standing about in the freezing cold in an open warehouse of high racking while a bloke uses a fork-lift to get down a large amount of tree that has been reduced to slices by a sawmill and then dried for a few years. It still has the bark on. There was a lot of prodding, and humming and hah-ing and looking at different lumps of wood before the final decision was made. Then I handed over some CHF 2’000 to become the owner of 5 huge slices of wood, each about 4m long. This takes a certain amount of faith. You could buy a couple of iPhones for that and still have change.
The wood was delivered to the workshop on Tuesday, and the afternoon was spent working out which parts of the slices were going to become the table . A lot of measuring and calculations. - not as easy as it looks. You mustn’t, apparently, use the heart of the tree as this is prone to splitting. You also need to be careful of using some of the sides, as they can be soft and the wrong colour. You may have to avoid knots and other natural imperfections, although I am deliberately going to include some for interest. I don’t want to end up with a thing that looks like a huge Rolls Royce dashboard or an outsized cigar box. It’s not going to be varnished for a start, but oiled. The trees don’t grow evenly, so that you might have the required width at the top, but not the bottom.
Finally we were able to get on with the sawing and this is the result.
Granted, it’s not currently too spectacular, but this is because the sawn planks haven’t yet been through the plane, let alone been sanded to reveal their true forms. I will show you the process as we go along. All quite exciting (for me at any rate). There should be enough left over to make a bench for the table. This is highly trendy. Any cool dining room now has a bench on one side of the table and chairs on the other. Anyway, as they say, I’ll keep you posted.
