Build your table.............cheap!

[churchbus]

We all want to find ways to save money. I was thinking about a table for my future conversion when I remembered something my Dad had build for his house.

He found a wooden cable spool (telephone and power companies often give these away) that was about 6 feet in diamater. The then took the saw to it and cut one end of the spool into a square and completely removed the other end. He then built a base for the newly squared table and frames for the benches. He took the wood from the removed end and layed them onto the bench frames for the seat and back of the benches.

When he was done he stained and polyurethaned the whole thing. It rugged, sturdy and beautiful.

The biggest draw back is that in its current state, it can't be dropped to be made into a bed. That's stage two.

[TravelingMan]

My parents had one in the back yard for a picknick table, when I was a little kid I'd roll that thing all over the yard.

[Eric von Kleist]

I was in a building salvage place the other day looking around. They had loads and loads and loads and loads of doors. Most of the slightly damaged or odd-lot, and so the prices are fairly cheap. Lots of kinds of doors. Three varieties came to mind as useful in schoolies, one as a table.

1) Solid-core door with smooth face panels (no moldings or inlays). Could be used as a partition wall. Just trim to fit the ceiling and install. Installation could be hidden easily with angle brackets: bolt brackets into place to hold door in such a manner that the door would be resting on top of the legs of the brackets -- that is, backwards from how I usually see people use them. You'd have to cut out a little groove in the bottom of the door to let it set level on the floor, and a little groove in the face of the door to have the bracket flush with the surface. After placing, simply cover with a base molding of some kind, top and bottom.

2) Narrow single panel decorative folding doors. The panels usually run 15 to 18 inches wide. Seperate the panels and then use them as sliding doors mounted between two partition walls. OR seperate the panels and bolt them to the wall of the bus sideways like wainscoating. They have raised molding that divides the panels up into decorative sections. This would make a nice 6' section of decorative wainscoting. You could use 1x material of a width appropriate to your installation to trim above, below, and between the panels.

3) Narrow solid-core folding doors with smooth surface (usually luan or oak or something like). These are probably NOT water resistant, but... Add additional hinges to one panel's edge. Mount that panel to a ledger board on the bus wall by the new hinges so that the other panel would fold UNDER the first as it is folded down to the wall. The ledger board will get in the way of proper folding unless you trim an amount equivalent to the thickness of the ledger board from the free end of the under-folding panel. Screw 1/2" CDX plywood to the upper face of both boards (table tops), and trim with 1x material so that the 1x material forms a lip sticking up 3/8" from the TOP of the tabletop. Inlay the table top with 1/4" tile over a 1/8" flexible thinset mortar, and grout. Voila! Folding up tile table!

[Steve]

If anyone missed Monster House on the discovery channel this week they redid an old RV. They used old spools to make really nice looking corner shelves, and made a table / folding bed out of some door and table parts and the benches out of an old pickup bed. Check it out if you missed it.