Rustic Spool Bar Table

Our dear little kitchen is a bit alternative compared to most. It sports a lovely corner window, funky sized drawers, an oven that I’m pretty sure was original to the house (built in 1949) and opens like the DeLorean on Back to the Future, and this peninsula that juts out in the middle of the room. I love it! But, I was having a little dilemma with the space at the end of the peninsula. A large blank area was left that needed something more. As I contemplated that space, I imagined a bar height table for those times when you want to eat an informal meal outside of the dining room. I wanted to make it an eat in kitchen.

It was on this lovely Saturday morning that Mr. Charming had to go in to work for a few hours and I was left to my devices trying to figure out what to put in that space. I stepped outside and the answer was there, literally right on our driveway. An electrical spool Brian had brought home from work!

I brought it into the kitchen and realized right away that it was too short. It needed to grow 9 1/2 inches to deserve to be called a “bar height” table.

So, I needed legs. I scavenged around our garage and shed. We have plenty of pallets, but I would need to use a ton to get them to the proper strength. The 2x4s in the shed weren’t quite big enough either. Then I remembered a leftover post from when my Dad repair the steps to our deck!

I have to give credit to my incredibly amazing Dad: not only did he provide this crucial piece of material, but he unknowingly told me how the legs would work best on this table.

“Four legs are nearly impossible to get perfectly even,” he often says in his sermons (if only I could convey his Hungarian accent over this text). “You have to have all four exactly the same length, otherwise the chair or table will wobble, but three, three is the ideal number. A chair that has three legs will never wobble. The same goes for your Christian life. You have to know God with your head, believe him in your heart, and the third point,” he points his finger out in front of him, “is out here, when you are following and doing God’s will by serving others.”

That message has always resonated with me, and due to my poor sawing equipment and skills, I knew I would never get four legs perfectly the same length. Three it is.

We used these gigantor wood screws (8 inches!), which, looking back was probably overkill, and attached the legs

It wasn’t working for me, though. I didn’t like how the bottom of the table looked, and how it would be annoying to slide a chair up to it. So, we cut the bottom circle of the spool into a triangle.

Still not loving the way it looked, I took some pallets, cut them to size, and attatched them to the legs to make a sort of skirt.

 

That’s more like it. It was sanded and then given a coat of Miniwax “Weathered Oak” stain.

It makes me think of an Irish Pub, though, I haven’t really spent much any time in an Irish pub. I can just see it: a dark smokey room decorated with shades of green, and there it is, sitting in a corner near the piano where a few “regulars” like to sit and swap fish stories over their mugs of ale, always trying to out do each other.

If only we had a model to show it off…Jordan will have to do

Look at that handsome little man. He’s growing so fast!

Anyway, this rustic spool table was a great cost free, Saturday project that, I think is going to get a lot of use. Now, I just need to find some stools to go with it.