The top of this little table is a single piece of tulip poplar that once was a closet shelf in my grandmother's house. The plank was much older than the closet, which was an add-on to a room that was originally built without closets. The underside of the shelf was black with that soft, almost crumbly texture that poplar gets after 90 or so years undisturbed in the dark.
The legs are white oak. I ripped them down from a 2x4 salvaged from a friend's barn. Guess what an 8' white oak 2x4 costs today. You won't be doing any balloon framing with them, I can tell you.
The apron sections that join the legs are also white oak. I don't recall where I got the original piece from. It had a severe wain, the curve in the surface from cutting the plank from the edge of a log. Most of the time wainy lumber gets trashed or ground up for secondary uses, or used as stickers in shipping, but I thought It would look good as an apron with the wain turned down. And it does.
I took some of the bottom six inches of the legs off to make a slight inside taper. This tends to give the table a more visually pleasing look to the feet, and it also makes it stand more firmly. The less actual area of the foot touching the ground, the less likely it is to have any wobble.
The table is 24" tall by 25" long and 12.5" wide. I gave the top a couple of coats of satin polyurethane but no stain. The wood already had so much color and character that stain would have been over kill.
The legs and the apron I gave a single coat of danish oil, and once that dried, one coat of satin poly over that.
I did all cutting, sanding,and assembly on this table in about four hours. Not having to glue up a top or do any mortising for a trestle base made this very fast.
The finishing took a couple days, mostly just in the waiting for the coats to dry really.
The thing is, this is a table that is solid, functional, and richly characterful. It will be useful long after I'm gone, and it took negligable time and effort,(from my point of view). It recycles and reuses materials from before I was born and gives them a second life. I can't imagine why people go to Walmart and trade their money for slabs of particle board faced with plastic wood grain photos when this is possible. When you give money, the earning of which cost you time out of your life which you can never get back, for any shoddy cookie cutter product, you're actually destroying that little bit of wealth. Nobody is ever going to treasure as a family heirloom the $49.99 flatpacked coffee table you got at target.
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