softpaths.blog

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I was grateful to receive a request to make a couple of pieces of furniture from a white oak tree this prospective client had felled in clearing the building site for their new home. They were planning their move-in after a long construction process and let me know the tree had already been milled into slabs by a local sawyer, had been kiln-dried, and was waiting patiently in the mill’s yard. All the hard work was done. Dreamy.

I eagerly accepted, the only small wrinkle being that the dining table itself was practically bigger than the whole of my workshop. I was again grateful to get to lean heavily on friend and furniture maker Michael Moran who has a much larger, and much more equipped (😅), workshop across the Hudson river. After shuttling the slabs to his workshop, there was much chin-scratching and shuffling around to find the most efficient and elegant use of the slabs we had. There was only so much wood to go around, and the client wanted to get a few pieces of substantial furniture from the lot. After flipping and flopping the slabs around for an afternoon or two, Michael fabricated the table top and leg plinths in component parts and we shuttled the assembled pieces back to mine for final touches and finishing.

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For the next piece, I next roped in another friend/ more talented woodworker (Jared Alon) to help me fabricate a generously proportioned entry table/ console from the leftover slabs we had remaining from the dining table build. I had saved the more character-y, less stable (but more gorgeous) slabs for this piece, knowing I could try to do the narrower width out of a single piece. Reinforced mitered corners and a deep stretcher gave the geometry of this ~7’er a clean presentation, which (I hope) set the stage for the dramatic grain to take pride-of-place.

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As you can see from the above, I’m a fairly poor documenter of finished work (probably because of the lack of finished work I actually find myself around…#90percentclub), but in this case these pieces did wind-up completed and are happily at rest in the client’s home, where I carefully dropped them off and promptly forgot to take any pictures.

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