One of the unavoidable facts of furnituremaking is that there will be waste in the process. Whether it’s off-cuts from our tables, shavings from our planes, or sawdust from our sanders, we spend our days turning pieces of wood into smaller ones. We feel a responsibility to make the most of every piece of wood that enters our shop, and we’re loathe to throw any out. In fact, we run a program under which we give off-cuts that aren’t going to make it into our projects to other local woodworkers.
Sometimes, when we make single-slab tables, we’re left with sizable offcuts — pieces two or three feet long, or even more. There are any number of reasons why we’d source a slab that’s that much longer than the final dimensions of the table, including structural, aesthetic, and economic ones; sometimes, our clients simply fall in love with a piece that’s bigger than they need.
Cannon Hill built a large live-edge walnut table for these clients, and while we were preparing to wrap up the excess material to deliver back to them along with the table, they elected to have us turn it into a coffee table. To us, that’s the perfect solution. After all, we know that every usable inch of the slab has been transformed into top-quality furniture that will last for ages.
The base that our clients selected has quickly become a favorite of ours here in the shop because it’s an original design that really shows off what we can do. We call it an “infinity base”, for fairly obvious reasons, and we’ve found that our clients are especially fond of them on live-edge coffee tables; the gentle, twisting curves are evocative of the same natural context as the live-edge tops, so they play really nicely together.
Whether you’re in the market for a large dining table, an offcut coffee table, both, or something else entirely, we’d love chat. Fill out the contact form below, email info@cannonhillwood.com, or call us at 857-576-2089 to get the conversation started.