Since my daughter turned 5, she has joined the ranks of those children (un)fortunate enough to have 2 bedrooms to furnish. In approaching her 6th birthday I asked her mother if there was anything she needed for her new room at her house, and she suggested a new table to do colouring/craft etc at. I was actually searching to buy a table and chairs, and was decidedly underwhelmed by the selection and the quality/cost ratio on offer.
Thankfully I stumbled across the plans for the Clara Table, and it was precisely what I was after. I have made various tables before, for garden and dining, and have always gone with reclaimed wood and a rustic style, but for this I did just use the plans as-is, and I bought new pine timber purely for the convenience of it.
The table is simple to build, I already had a pocket hole jig, and the table itself took about 90minutes to build. Most of this time was spent sanding off the foaming glue I decided to use between the planks used for the top. If you are considering using this sort of glue, or indeed any glue, I'd say it isn't necessary. I had neverade a table top of this construction before, and went for the belt and braces approach. In my opinion it's totally unnecessary, doesn't add much security, but adds plenty of time to the project. If you really want, I'd go for bog standard wood glue, but by the time you screw it onto the legs, it's solid as a rock anyway.
It is mentioned to set the aprons back a way, to avoid splitting the legs. I did this, by using an off-cut of the 3x1 as a spacer on the face of the aprons as I screwed them in. Worked a treat, set the aprons back, but not all the way, and gives the illusion of a little more heft to the dimensions.
I then painted the top with chalk based emulsion, distressed and did the signwriting to personalise it, finished it with wax and my daughter was more delighted than I ever thought any child could be by having a table daddy made for her birthday, and at a fraction of the cost of a shop bought one of far lower quality.
Am.so.pleased I stayed on this website, and have already lined up the matching chairs for her as my next project!
Thank you for inspiring me to get back to making things again...it's been a while!
The timber cost me about £20, and the biggest expense was all the paint tester pots for the top!
Finish - £30 on various tester pots of paint, beeswax and another 2 days of literally watching paint dry!
Top - various chalk based emulsions, wet distressed, signwriting in tombo brush marker for the black, and chalk emulsion with added sparkle for the blue, painted with narrow flat ferrule brush.
Adding the glitter to the paint was a mistake really...was a nice idea, but made the paint very difficult to get clean lines with on the scale I did it. Also, required a huge amount of wax and polishing until the bumps weren't raised anymore.
Bees wax to protect and finish