Custom Dining Room Table in the Making: Prepping and Staining

Ever since we moved into our home in 2011, we have wanted the Benchwright Pottery Barn dining room table.  I will let you take a moment to bask in its beauty!

As much as we loved and longed for it, it just simply wasn’t in the budget. So, I went on Pinterest to search for ideas of how we could make our own, and I stumbled upon plans from the amazing and talented Ana White.  Tom’s grandfather is an amazing carpenter and woodworker so we showed him Ana’s plans. Not only did he think we could pull it off, he was gracious enough to tell us he’d be willing to help…a lot! Once he knew what our specific wishes were, he started getting together supplies and preparing the wood for the table.

For this portion of the project, he labeled everything for us (you can see the letters at the end of each plank) so that we knew what the correct order was. Once we wiped them clean, we were ready for stain!

I want to give a very special thanks to my awesome friends at Minwax for sending us this amazing stain to test out and use. You will see the color later in the post, but I HIGHLY reccomend the Minwax Wood Finish stain in Dark Walnut.  This product went on easily, covered everything well and wiped off clean. Two thumbs up!

To apply the stain, we used foam brushes and wiped everything down with a clean cloth.  We wanted the table to be dark, so we ended up applying three coats – waiting in between each one for the wood to dry.

Note: we only stained the tops and the bottoms of the wood because eventually the wood will be glued together on the sides and wood glue works best on unstained wood.  Also, we stained before securing all the planks together, in case there are any accidental wood glue run-over spots.

Tip: This little piece of wood (below) saved us a ton of time.  It is simply extra piece of scrap wood cut on an angle.  This allowed us to flip the planks over and stain both sides.  Because of the angle, it had minimal contact with the wood, so even if the stain was still a bit tacky when we flipped the wood over it was no problem.

Once we had everything stained, we put all the letters of the planks back in order to see what the top will (eventually) look like.

We let the planks dry for the table top and also stained the legs using the same process.  While Tom’s grandpa assembles the table top, we are searching for the rod iron, turn buckles and over sized bolts to finish the look of the table, just like the pottery barn version.

Questions?  Just ask. We’ll keep you all updated with Part II of this post once we have more to share!