Breakfast Nook Dining Table

Choosing a dining table for our breakfast nook was not an easy process. We knew we wanted a farmhouse style table. One big problem we kept running into with finding one to go in our nook was the size. The farmhouse tables tend to be pretty ginormous. Our breakfast nook is definitely not built for a ginormous table. I searched high and low and I kept finding huge tables with huge price tags. Josh talked about building one off and on for a while. Since we had so many projects to work on already, I just wasn't hearing it. I'm a do-er. Josh is a it gets done when it gets done-er. I didn't want a dining table when it got done, I wanted it now - so I kept searching for a table to buy. Well, after enough looking, I decided maybe building was the best option. Josh was going to be leaving for Nashville a couple weekends ago and I decided - meh, maybe now is a good time to build a table. He won't be home to force me to slow down, so why not? I was going to surprise him with it, but I can't keep secrets from him and I ended up hinting that I may work on a dining table over the weekend. Fail. 

Here are a couple

This is Pottery Barn's Benchwright table. I love the look of that table. I do not love the price. $1,300 for just the table...no thanks!

I also found this one at World Market that I loved. It was less than half the price of the Pottery Barn table, but too long.

Anyway, I started researching like a crazy woman. I found Ana White's website back when we were house shopping in MD and I saved (this was before Pinterest) a bunch of projects that I wanted to do. One of them was our bed, that my dad built. We never actually built any of them. Nevermind that...there were tons of projects that I WANTED to do. I knew she had some great stuff, so that's where I started. Don't worry, I didn't just pick a table to build without consulting Josh. We looked at some of Ana's plans together and he actually picked the one I ended up choosing. It was actually my second choice. Once I was committed to it though, I was in love with it.

These are the plans for Ana's knockoff.

So...Friday after work, I went to Lowe's to shop for wood. Let me tell you, it's not super easy to find nice, straight boards at Lowe's! We had gift cards though, so I was set on getting everything from Lowe's. You can't beat free! I bought a few other things and the supplies for the benches (which I didn't end up making), so I'm not 100% sure how much I spent, but it was roughly $250. That's with getting a LOT more stain and poly than we needed because we will use it in other projects (and with a 10% off coupon). That's a heck of a lot better than $1,300!

Anyway, here are some pictures of my progress...

 This is my little workspace...before I got it dirty.

 Partially assembled legs

 This is my progress at some point Saturday

 The frame is getting there!

 Almost ready for the table top...or so I thought. The ends were not very stable and I messed up some of the boards on the inside so that the table just was not going to sit even. I thought the table was a goner and there was no way it was going to end up in the house. I decided to start staining and figure the rest out when Josh got home. At this point, it wasn't possible to finish it before Josh got home anyway. I decided to wait until he got home so he could help me fix my mistakes.

I stained the undersides and everything because I thought it would be much easier before I added the table top. I was right. SO glad I did that.

 

I went ahead and stained the wrong side of the boards too

I left it like this until Josh got home. I had exhausted my ideas and I didn't know what to do to fix it.  We spent a full night going over all the issues and trying to figure out how to fix it. In addition to the ends not being very stable, some of the pieces of the frame were sticking up farther than they should have been and they were going to prevent the boards on the top of the table from sitting flat. Not a good thing. We had to take some pieces off and re-attach them, we had to re-cut some of the top boards, we had to plane some of the boards underneath because I didn't nail them evenly, we had to sand a LOT of stuff that probably shouldn't have needed to be sanded in order to get them even. Between the 2 of us, we figured it all out!

 Josh nailing the boards on. Getting close!!! 

  

Hours of sanding and lots of wood filler later...

Time to stain! - We used MinWax Dark Walnut - We both love the color!

 

 Finishing up the stain

 About 8 coats of poly later, it's in our breakfast nook and we love it!!! 

For the poly, I got MinWax's Oil Modified Water Based Polyurethane in Satin. It was super easy to work with and you only need 2 hours between coats. It was more expensive than the oil based stuff, but with the easy cleanup and the fact that we only needed to wait 2 hours between coats (vs 8), I thought it was worth the extra money. The link above is for the gallon, which is definitely not necessary for this project.

I love everything about it!

I found these chairs on sale at Target. I spent a total $235 on all four chairs, so roughly $485 on the table and 4 chairs.

Yea...that's a LOT better than the Pottery Barn table or even the World Market table that was a LOT less. I'll take it!

On top of saving the money, I know this is a solid table and we get the satisfaction of knowing WE built the table that our kids will do their homework on, dye Easter eggs on and spill their cereal on. Even before kids, we'll have many game nights and breakfasts here. I think we'll have lots of great memories here!