Maple Slab Tables

February 13, 2013

Every winter we see a lot of trees come down here on the North Oregon Coast.  This very winter we experienced wind gusts of up to 90 mph during one storm.  Falling trees can stir up a lot of fear for many people around here.  Although it is a bit unnerving, I’m not going to lie, I appreciate the resources that these storms often provide.

A Maple tree came down a few years ago several miles from our house.  A friend cut it into rounds and gifted us with some of them.  After seasoning the wood, Kyle and I made an attempt to create something beautiful out of one of them.  I spent many hours standing in our backyard sanding that first slab.  Kyle started by using a belt sander and I finished it off with a palm sander, using various grits of sandpaper.  When I got it as smooth as I possibly could (mostly ignoring the bottom side), I stained it with OSMO, an eco-friendly stain containing mostly natural oils.  We hemmed and hawed over what to make the legs, or base, out of.  We decided on a left over block of fir that Kyle had inherited from a job he was on.  The finished product sits proudly in our living room.

Recently, after finishing our master bedroom (more on the details of our addition to come), we ran into the dilema of needing bedside tables.  Luckily, I had been sporadically sanding away on another maple slab and it was sitting, unstained and dry, in the shed behind our house.  Problem solved.  Kyle used his 10″ Circular Saw to cut it in half, did a little bit more sanding and stained it, this time, with Verde; another eco-stain containing natural oils.  He finished by mounting the halves to the wall on either side of our bed.

So, as of now, we have two maple slabs in our house, serving us as 3 useful tables.  They add a touch of rustic beauty to our rooms, and they were both environmentally and economically savvy!

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