Cherry Board Farmhouse Table Years in the Making

Reader Contribution by Ilene White Freedman and House In The Woods Farm
Published on March 14, 2020
1 / 2
2 / 2

For 25 years, this stack of two-inch-thick boards has sat under the house waiting to become a beautiful farmhouse table. It waited and it waited. For 25 years, it waited.

We would propose the table project with incentives—for this anniversary, let’s make the table. For my birthday, let’s do it. Let’s do it later, we are too busy building the farm. The farm was born; the children were born. We’ll do it when the kids are older, because we are going to ruin the kitchen table with projects. We got a hand-me-down kitchen table. How many projects were done on the kitchen table? Incubating chickens probably shouldn’t have happened on the kitchen table. Stamping seedling tags with permanent ink probably shouldn’t have happened on the kitchen table. But they did. We knew they would. All the while, this stack of cherry boards waited.

We started to realize the cherry table project would never fit into our routine. We will never get to it, but we’d really appreciate the table. That big permanent black ink stain on the hand-me-down table is starting to bother me. Let’s make the table for our 20th anniversary. We have heard that one before.

When my husband, Phil, prepared the land to build our house, he cut down two cherry trees. He hired a guy to bring his (not very) portable sawing mill up our steep driveway in the woods to mill the cherry into boards. The hired guy said he’d never bring his mill up our driveway again. He planed the boards and drove his mill home. Phil built the house and he used the one inch cherry boards to make inside doors and a closet. He set aside these two-inch-thick boards for a cherry table. That was 25 years ago.

Comments (0) Join others in the discussion!
    Online Store Logo
    Need Help? Call 1-800-234-3368