Waterfall coffee table acrylic1/1/2024 ![]() Use some tape (foil tape is the cat's pajamas) to dam up anything you're filling on the edges, and use some putty to make a dam if you want to minimize the runout you will need to sand later. ![]() Once you have everything planed sufficiently it's time to fill any knots, splits, and cracking with epoxy. You don't have to get everything perfectly flat or smooth at this point because you will probably plane or at least heavy sand again after the next step. ![]() You can also use a hand plane or a router sled jig, if you're not familiar with a router sled just google it, it's your best option using a pretty common tool. I used a power hand planer to get rid of any saw marks and flatten out a tiny bit of cupping that occurred during the drying process. Once you have your slab the next step is to flatten and smooth is out. So try not to let this situation consume your every thought for the rest of your life, let's just move on to the next step. But being so impatient I decided to risk it and build the table right now anyway, if it has any severe warping or separating I can just fix it at that point. ![]() I know, I just said a year per inch thickness, thanks Mom. I had the log for a couple years but only had it cut into a slab for about a year. But aside from being fat, ugly, balding, and impatient I'm also very impatient. Now the general rule of thumb for air drying is you need to wait one year per inch of thickness in the slab. The short story is you just stack the planks on top of each other with a spacer in between them, but if you're going to do this you need to research it more because there are a lot of details that go into this procedure. I don't mill enough lumber to have the first two options make sense, so I went with the air drying method. There are a few ways of doing this you can drop it off at a local lumber dryer and they put it in their dryer for a fee, you can build a homemade drying shack or simple tarp operation, or you can just stack the lumber and let it air dry. After cutting the wood into slabs it needs to be dried. I used a chainsaw mill to cut that giant mamajama into 2.5" slabs, knowing I wanted the finished table thickness to be roughly 2". So after cutting the tree down and hauling it to my house it was time to get slabbin'. One person's trash, am I right? You can basically use any type of tree/wood for this table, I just happen to have gotten walnut. I was fortunate enough to know a guy who told me about a big walnut tree that was going to be removed and chipped up as part of a stream rehabilitation project. But since I'm a card carrying hillbilly I have to make my own. With that in mind, we reached out to eight stylish people who own (and have enthusiastically Instagrammed) these tables, in various shapes, vintage and new, to find out where and why they purchased theirs.I'm going to fly through this section because it's certainly much easier and faster to purchase a wood slab. And what better way to temper it all than with a table that is less of a shout, more of a whisper? By virtue of its see-through design, the clear coffee table essentially acts as a blank canvas, deferring to the decorative whims of its owner. Many people have reacted to the somber mood of this past year by tabling their AirSpace goals, fending off their sadness with cozy clutter, loud hues, chaotic patterns and enough plants to rival the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. But my Instagram skulking also revealed that maximalism played a part in its popularity. It would make sense to blame the minimalist trend for the current ubiquity of this understated coffee table, which has been around in one form or another for years. (Though Irby’s floor was bare, most of the people who own these tables also seem to harbor a penchant for Cold Picnic.) In the ensuing weeks, it seemed like all my feed consisted of were images of the table, in various iterations of glass and acrylic, sitting in the plant-strewn dwellings of other writers, artists, and cool influential-types on Instagram, including a stacked acrylic side table in best-selling author Samantha Irby’s living room. Not long after, I scrolled upon another version, again on a Cold Picnic rug, except this one was just a single shiny slab of acrylic. I made a mental note to look for a similar style - and so did Instagram’s algorithm, apparently. I loved the unadorned, simple look of the coffee table and coincidentally happened to be redecorating my place for the umpteenth time since lockdown. It was littered with books, a zen garden, and other comforting ephemera that, on account of its glass makeup, all effectively appeared to be floating. The first time I laid eyes on this particular clear coffee table, it was sitting in writer Haley Nahman’s Brooklyn living room, perched atop a Cold Picnic rug. If I scrolled too fast, I might have missed it. Editor Hannah Baxter’s see-through coffee table (and Cold Picnic rug).
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