Building our farmhouse table & repairing chairs

To preface, I have a great interest in power tools. As for skill, lacking. I come from a family that builds, a lot. My mom has built everything from garden sheds to chicken coups, tables, fences, four poster-beds, and everything in between. A few weeks ago, she built the rope swing platform below. She's taken a few classes, learned from her mom, and can use just about any power tool you could think of. My dad is very handy and got started by helping work on the structures of boats. Together they designed their home and built a miniature scale model of it for the architect, for heaven's sake. I have a lot to learn.

My grandma, at almost 80 years old, managed to fully sheetrock and build this library in her home so that she could use the opposite side as a pantry. When she passed, we found tons of tools in the back of her truck as well as wire cutters, saws, post hole diggers, etc. Naturally, during her last hour on this earth before she passed away, she built a knife rack. I feel like it's a family legacy of hard work, but I have so much to learn! I love to build, but sometimes I don't have the best attention span when I'm working in new territory.

I was able to select some chairs out from my late Grandmother's life-long antique/thrifting possession. I really loved the legs on the chairs and have collected other pieces in our house to match. We needed a small kitchen table to fit into a little nook we have in our family/kitchen area in our new home. I really wanted to buy this great farmhouse table we saw in Wyoming, but had no way to get it home. So, we decided to build our own, thinking it would match our country-style chairs the best!

First, I had to address the chairs. I loved how beat up they were, but they needed some TLC. They had no seat bottom or cushions, for starters. Two are a little bit different from the others, but I like that. So, I drew a template out of newspaper and followed the steps below.

(sorry for the blur, I had to take a picture of a picture).

While I'm at my yapping, I really hate to re-finish anything that's old. It pains me. But these chairs will also be in our dining room if we entertain, so they needed a little bit of fixing up (I figure 2 people don't need 6 kitchen chairs and 6 dining chairs at our point in life.) The happy medium is a product I love, called Restore-A-Finish in walnut. It's a wipe-on, wipe-off product applied with steel wool. It's not a stain, but just kind of enhances the wood that's there. You can see the before and after on this one chair that was much lighter than the rest.

Onto our table. We had Home Depot cut the wood to our measurements and then just used a screwdriver to secure the apron to the legs. Grant is so great at building, and is a huge help at making my home hopes and ideas a reality.

So here's our farmhouse table before (and before we cut the legs down further after HD cut them a bit too long)...

After staining the top...

Now we just had to paint the base. I mixed up a warm off white/yellow, painting and distressing a little but I didn't want it to look obvious like some "shabby chic" tables do.

And After...

It's not perfect, but I love that we were able to make our kitchen table together.

Ic an't wait to put curtains up in this little nook (and hopefully replace the light fixture with an old country one)!

Grant built a taller version of our table with a shelf for tools and gifted it to me as a surprise for a work table for projects & sewing. He is one sweet husband and I'm a lucky girl to have him.

Now, we're working on our trestle-style dining table! Why not just buy one? Well, we like to do things the hard way over here so we can say, "what were we thinking?" later!

Anyone want to take a power tools class? No, but seriously, I hope to take one someday soon! Have you built anything?