My honey-do list usually starts out the same. My wife will ask if I can make something for her and then asks how much it will cost in wood. I told her it would probably run around $60 so we headed to Home Depot and bought some white pine boards.
I bought a few 1″ x 10″ x 6′ to use for the legs. One 1″ x 10″ cut in half and ripped into 2 1/2″ wide segments would yield me two legs. After I laminated three of the boards, I sized them to 2 1/4″ square and then turned them on the lathe. I looked at the picture she gave me but I turned the leg from feel of what I thought it looked liked. When I was done, we both decided the bottom part of the leg looked too “boxy” so I decided to turn another leg.
The second leg turned out better than the first. When I threw a picture of both legs onto instagram, one of my followers said that he liked the bottom of the leg on right but liked the top of the leg on the left. I agreed so I refined the leg so the ball of the leg looked more like a ball and not a fat lazy bead.
After refining the leg, I made five more freehand. I’m by no means a master wood turner. In fact, my wood turning is passable at best. The only lesson I’ve ever taken on wood turning is watching The Woodwright’s Shop over the years. I take a ruler, a parting tool, and some calipers and try to make the sixth one to look like the first. In the end, I think the legs came out pretty good.
My wife wanted table to be fourteen inches wide by five feet long so I laid the legs on the top and decided the dimensions of each part of the frame.
After cutting out all the parts of the frame, I attached them to the legs with pocket hole joinery. This is a simple table made from construction grade material so I wasn’t in the mood to start cutting a bunch of mortises for mortise and tenon joinery. Sorry.
I sized and glued the bottom shelf to the lower frame. Ideally this would be best suited for plywood due to the expansion and contraction of the wood however, after studying the original picture, this is how the table my wife wanted was built so I went ahead and made it the same way. Eventually there will be a nice crack in the middle of the shelf, but that will just add to the farmhouse look.
I made the drawers as simple as possible as well. I planed down some of the pine to 1/2″ thick and made the sides with rabbeted joinery and a 1/4″ plywood bottom. I then simply glued and nailed a drawer front to the box.
In the end, this is how the table came out. Not bad for a weekend build. My wife will finish the table with some sort of weathered look stain. I’m happy with it and it’s one less thing off of my honey-do list.
Here’s the table completed with a stain Anita put on. It’s for sale at a design show. It originally wasn’t meant to be for sale, but we had such a good show, we needed more inventory to sell.
MVFlaim Furnituremaker 
Nicely done except for the pocket screws.
So, this project in materials cost you only $60. Here in Australia, at best it would cost $300 in pine. But I think it would probably be close to $400. When I read in magazines and hear people on YouTube say wood is cheap, I wish they would add in the U.S.
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Yeah, pine is dirt cheap here in the states. Not sure what cheap softwoods they have over there that would compare to pine.
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Pine or timber in general is a rip off here in Oz.
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Did you know if I were to make a traditional tool chest out of pine it would cost me $600. Where is the normality here?
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thats insane. I bet rosewood would be cheaper than pine over there.
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Hell no. In the last ten years prices have been slowly creeping up and up and what’s ironic that no one’s the wiser. Private forums where you think you’ll get better prices are even worse, yet they sell like hot cakes to people who’s never been in the industry and there seems to be more of them than those who are.
The root cause of these high prices have nothing to do with population but monopolisation of the timber industry hence price control. They log and then hoard creating a scarcity of timbers forcing the price up. Another rotten industry is the meat industry. They blame drought for the price increase but what they don’t tell you is that the Chinese own the cattle farms just like they do to all our water and milk. They ship off the meat back to China using there own ships leaving no money and very little meat to us. Hence the price goes up and lie is spun to the Australian people and everyone cops it in the chin and moves on.
Even wood that is so common and there is an abundance of is sold at ridiculously high prices.
You know what the funny thing is though. They say if you don’t like it leave rather than fixing the problem they stick their heads in the sand like the bird. If it sees no danger then all is well.
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I don’t really know what England’s like in terms of prices of timber but somehow I have the feeling that it’s not much different to us.
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Yeah it seems like the Chinese are only out for themselves. Hope your situation improves over there soon. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your country and wanting to fix it as opposed to cowaring to globalists.
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Well said
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When I mentioned wood I was referring to camphor laurel
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