This past summer, Dan and I teamed up with our extremely handy father to construct several rustic/industrial looking tables. The first prototype turned out simply amazing, so we built 8 more (with a few more to come this month).
And I must say, the tables are looking particularly badass.
We used white oak boards that we procured from a sawmill outside of Dover. The proprietor of the mill said most of his white oak boards get sold to cities to lay underneath buried pipelines as the oak (in the absence of oxygen) provides a solid underground support for up to 70 years. It also happens to be the material of choice for most American wine barrels. We plan to use American white oak barrels extensively in our sour beer program, thus, we felt it would be neat to have our served beer “sitting on oak” just like our future fermenting and maturing beer.
This was a fun project to do. I was not very familiar with the art of woodworking at the start, but building these tables was a good introduction to the discipline. Not too complex, but plenty of exposure to the basics.
It was also neat to be making such a basic article of furniture by hand (okay, and maybe with the assistance of some 21st century tools) and realizing through each time-consuming step how civilization has completely automated this process to the point where we don’t even think about it. So I have a lot more appreciation for my cheap kitchen table which is a lot more level, smoother, and more uniform than the 8 tables we made so far….but it also has exactly zero soul, so I may go back after all of this and make a table for myself (just kidding, I’ll be brewing too much to have time for woodworking :)
We’re almost finished, and I think I’ll be a little sad that project is over. Luckily, I have plenty of beer brewing and shameless self-promotion activities to keep me occupied for the foreseeable future.