Dining Table

When I moved to the flat I am in at the moment, I didn’t have much furniture, and for the first time in Hong Kong I had enough space for a big dining table. Living abroad makes it kind of difficult to buy nice/expensive furniture. You just never know where you’ll go next, and when, so I just never wanted to buy nice things that I could keep for a long time. So the goal was to make a big ish dining table, on a super limited budget!

I went to the closest wood shop that I could find, and bought some construction timber made from wood offcuts. We could call it recycled but not quite sure it is! Anyway, it was super cheap, and I quite liked the fact that the wood color was not consistent and each timber was made of a lot of small bits joined together. Was a good way to add a kind of pattern to the tabletop and maybe hide the fact that it is super cheap wood. I am anyway convinced that this looks better than if I went for regular construction wood, that has a “consistent” color, because it is one solid piece of wood. 

I think it would be important to mention that this was the first piece of furniture that I have ever made! It’s not bad, but the building techniques used here are pretty pour. L brackets everywhere, screws (not countersunk, sorry Jimbo <3), nothing really pretty.

 I did make a good job on joining the table top though, knowing that I made the table in my living room, with only a ratchet strap, a circular saw, a sander and a drill. My flat was quite dusty afterwards though..!

I covered the whole thing with cheap oil from IKEA, and it was done!

The table is 140 cm x 120 cm. At least was. A table that wide is stupid because you are seating way too far away from people in front of you! And I needed more space later on, so I ended up cutting it to 140 cm x 100 cm.

I have been using it for 4 years, not trying to take good care of it in any way, and it is still very strong and doing the job quite well!

The cost in wood was about 400 hkd, which is about 50 usd. Not too bad I guess!