Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Beechwold Woodshop 101

So it all started with cookbooks. Two cookbooks in particular: New Art of Japanese Cooking and The French Laundry Cookbook. Trust me, if you're interested in serious books about current American Cuisine these books are a good place to start. Unforunately we didn't have any appropriate place to showcase such handsome tomes....What we needed was a coffee table!

So we went to our favorite antique store, Down Memory Lane, at the corner of High St. and Como Ave. While they didn't have any coffee tables, they did have a fantastic section of windows. As I have discovered is typical in the world of home ownership, when you go looking for something simple to add to the house you usually leave the store with a project. Between Liz, myself and the kind proprietor we settled on this bad boy:



Not bad for $35, eh? The above photo was taken after I had spent an afternoon in the outdoors stripping the paint off with my good friend KWIK:



Some really potent fumes there. Ok, so unless we could find some legs for this window, I might as well just put the French Laundry Cookbook on the floor. This would never do. So, off to Lowe's where we picked up these handy brackets on the cheap:



And once they were attached we just had to find the right size legs. We bought two lengths of the same leg-style. The ones on the left of the photo here were toooo big, but the ones on the right were just right:



Time to roll up the old sleeves for some manual labor:



and that's how the window became the table:



I should mention here that we attached the legs such that the "inside" of the window is the "top" of the table. That way the panes of glass are flush with the wood and not recessed as it would have been the other way around. Finally, we just needed to give it two coats of the Minwax Polyshades Antique Walnut Satin (no photo available at press time), move it into the living room, and get Gus into position for the big picture:



¡VOILA! That is one handsom devil (and Gus looks pretty good too!) You guys can come over to see the table and take copious notes from Morimoto anytime, just keep your feet off the table.

8 comments:

Erin said...

That's fantastic! I absolutely love it! You need to send pics to Grandma, she'll get a kick out of it!

Steve said...

This could be the start of something huge.
"This Old House Columbus"

Randi said...

I'm impressed and you don't get HGTV!

Sean said...

Next up: Liz is finishing the fabric in the basement and then I'll be putting up the chair-rail, probably on vacation which is 6 sweet days away....

Anonymous said...

If you start a "This Old House: Columbus," you know my dad will be there!

rocnrbn said...

Sean,
This is my first official BLOG comment.
It seems that I work on computers for 50 hours a week, but am still seemingly clueless about how it all works. Heck, even Aunt Robin beat me to it!!!
Anyway, that looks like a great project!!! Did you have your dad bring his large or small hammer? Just kidding.
We haven't heard yet if you or Liz have time off for the holidays, we'll miss you other if you don't
Keep up the good work! Norm and I are very proud of you
Love,
Uncle Bob

rocnrbn said...

Sean,
This is my first official BLOG comment.
It seems that I work on computers for 50 hours a week, but am still seemingly clueless about how it all works. Heck, even Aunt Robin beat me to it!!!
Anyway, that looks like a great project!!! Did you have your dad bring his large or small hammer? Just kidding.
We haven't heard yet if you or Liz have time off for the holidays, we'll miss you other if you don't
Keep up the good work! Norm and I are very proud of you
Love,
Uncle Bob

Randi said...

Hey Bob,
Took me awhile to figure out your "name". Clever...