SLAB IN THE FACE!

I'll admit that Adam and I are no different than anyone else who dramatically swoons over those beautiful as well as pricey, organic modern examples of furniture art.  We too, think to ourselves and for the most part accept the fact that, "We'll never be able to afford something like that!"  When coffee tables are around 4Gs, who could?  Well, recently we have made one of those "unobtainable beauties" and have listed it on Etsy for under $500!

Wait a minute, back up!  We are starving ingenuitive designers, surely we can muster up enough resources and skills to take a reclaimed wood slab from the wood pile to our family room.  of course we can!

Actually, it all started when Adam received a call from a guy that said that he had a huge tree which had fallen down a while back and was in need for it to be cleared.  Once Adam arrived at this guys home to take a look and decide if in fact he wanted to physically saw and remove the slab himself, it didn't take very long to make up his mind.  The slab was from a old maple tree and had to have weighed 100lbs.  I wasn't with the hubs when he went to pick up the wood, so when he brought it back I kind of felt bad for his bad back because he ended up moving it by himself!

Here's what the slab looked like after he got it home (ignore the other wood in the background that we are hoarding for other future projects).

Originally, the slab was a lot thicker.  Since this was an experiment, Adam sliced the slab in half with the chainsaw.  We figured that there was plenty to go around!  As you can see, this is about as raw as you can get!  You may be asking yourself, "Do they really see furniture when they look at something like this?"

Well, we do understand that when hand crafting, nothing is ever fast or easy, but eventually you do start to see the light of day!  Here's a photo showing results from chiseling the bark off and after the first round of sanding.

Then, there was more sanding to do...

And more sanding to do...

After countless hours of sanding over the course of a week, Adam finally reached the finishing stage, where he applied two coats of medium walnut Danish oil, and a top sealer coat of polyurethane.  After the slab was all nice and finished, Adam made three hairpin legs out of solid steel rod and we coated them in a brass metallic paint.

And here is our final result!  We could not be any happier with our organic modern outcome!

Until next time,

A + B