follow your heart woodworking: Coastal Hall Table

I'm using spindles for the legs. I bought a box of them over five years ago from someone who had leftovers from making a staircase and railings. Although spindles like this are nicely turned, they usually have squared off sections on both the top and the bottom. While I've seen people use them for table legs, I find they look awkward with the squared off end on the floor and you would never see a table like that in a furniture store. That all being said I rounded off the corners and made some round disks to add to the bottom of the spindles.

As I've shown before on this blog, I connect my tables using mortises and tenons, I don't typically screw the parts together. To make the mortises this time I used my router in my homemade router table. Below you can see on the left is the nozzle for my shop vac, a piece of wood that I use as a "stopper" and the fence that guides the wood so that the router bit is centered on the spindle leg.

The next photo shows the leg as it reaches the stop

And this is what the top of the leg looks like after the two mortises are put in.

The wood for the aprons is thicker than the mortises so I then take some wood off of each side of the apron pieces so that they make tenons that fit in the mortises. I use my table saw for that step. The apron pieces tenons still have to be shortened to fit them even with the top of the legs.

The legs and aprons were painted white and then distressed and covered with stain, then I put on a clear coat of polyurethane.

For the top I used pieces of wood that were painted different colours ranging from white to dark turquoise. They were then distressed, stained and clear coated.

Underneath I used table clips that fit into slots in the front and back apron pieces. This allows the top to widen or narrow with changing humidity.

So, this is my Coastal Table:

This table is tall, narrow and long, perfect for a hallway or behind a sofa.

31 1/2" tall x 12" wide x 37" long