Recently, my fiancé and I decided we’d like to work on a hobby/DIY project that would result in us acquiring a new, hopefully good quality, piece of furniture. I’ve never really had much space for a nice dinner table, however my current house has a dining room that’s big enough to have a nice-sized table. Thus, we decided to make our own piece. After doing quite a bit of research, we decided on a style we liked that seemed within our capabilities: a concrete table with a wooden base. I utilized plans and recommendations from Uncookie Cutter by April Rutherford, which led me to some solid table base plans from Ana White I’ll share with you our experience of following these guides to build our very own table made with concrete, wood and love.
Melamine Form
After determining what size of tabletop we wanted (72" by 42"), it was time to build the form. The idea was that since the concrete takes time (7 days minimum in our case) to dry, we could pour the concrete and work on the wooden table base while it was curing. A common approach to building a concrete counter form is to use melamine, which is what we did. Melamine forms allow you to pour the concrete upside-down, so that once cured you can flip them over and remove the form for a (hopefully) smooth finish. This is the approach we took. Here you can see a picture of the form after it was built. We chose to make our tabletop 1.5" thick and made the form accordingly. We used silicon to cover the cracks around where the base met the “walls” of the form. I wish we would have been more careful with the silicon here - if it gets on the form it will leave imperfections on the finish side of the concrete.
Something to note at this point is that the floor was not level. I live in an old home which has aged over the years. This slab, after cured, would weigh over 400 pounds so we wanted to pour the tabletop in the room it was going to live, as suggested by Uncookie Cutter. The form needs to be level, so that’s why we utilized 2x4’s and fiberglass shims to level the form out. It worked out quite well for me. Once everything was level and ready to go, it was time to mix and pour the concrete.
Concrete
After reading countless guides and tutorials from DIYers of yesterday, we decided to pay a little extra money for Quikrete Countertop Mix as opposed to cheaper alternatives. There were two main reasons we did this: strength and aggregate size. This specific concrete mix is reinforced so, in theory, it is stronger once cured properly. Larger pieces of aggregate have also been filtered out, so that the concrete overall is finer, meaning potentially a smoother finish with less bumps. The extra cost didnt put us at risk of going over budget and we felt the peace of mind was worth it.
You can see our hand-mixing tools that we used in the picture above. They worked out quite well for us - the process was tiring with only two people but we managed and it wasn’t too overwhelming. The mixing tray held one bag of concrete and the necessary water and dye that we used with enough space to mix by hand. We used five bags of concrete (4.5), so we had to mix, pour, trowel and repeat for each bag. Once we got the hang of it and optimized our process, it was quite managable.
The picture above is about 75% of the way through the process. At this point we paused with concrete-pouring and placed our metal reinforcement. Since the form is upside-down we had to put the reinforcement near the top. This was a bit tricky as the reinforcement was bent a little bit. I wish I had straightened it out before placing it, but in the end it turned out okay. After placing the reinforcement, we mixed up the rest of the concrete and filled the form to the top. We screeded it with a 2x4 and trowelled it to as fine of a finish as we could. We probably put a bit too much water in our concrete as we were getting tired and going for the ease of pouring, however in the end it all turned out okay. It made it easer to screed as well, so I’ll take it. The picture below is what it looked like after we were done.
It was then time to switch gears while the concrete cured and start on the wooden base.
Wooden Base
We stuck pretty closely to Ana White’s 4x4 truss beam table plans for the base. We did some simple algebra to convert the plans to the table base size we needed given our concrete top. Once we had the dimensions we made a cut list and decided how much wood we needed. We shopped around and chose untreated cedar as it is a solid wood but easy to work with. We chose to shop close to home at a local lumber store. The quality was much better than the big box stores and it ended up being around the same price - plus we wanted to support a local shop. We then cut the boards to length and sanded them lightly to maintain the rustic/natural look.
I have some experience with a Kreg Jig so we used the HD version for this project. Due to the amount of water cedar absorbes, we went with an unconventional glue for woodworking: Gorilla Glue Polyurethane. This glue expands a bit to absorb into the wood better - just be careful not to use too much! The concept here is that you drill out 2 angled holes in the board you are securing and then you secure with specialty screws at an angle. I followed the lead of the plans from Ana White and used the glue at the joints. Looking back, I probably used a bit too much glue as it expanded more than I was expecting. We started with building the ends of the base as you can see here:
The next step as to connect the ends together and put it all together. Here’s what it looked like when we were finished.
Once it was all together, we were at a tedious part of the project. The table is together at this point, however there are a bunch of holes in the wood! Some are covered but some show which need to be fixed. We used the Kreg Jig Custom Pocket-Hole Plug Cutter with the HD bit to cut our own custom plugs out of the scrap cedar we had. This is an example of the plugs cut and the bit we used.
Now, you just cut them at a 15 degree angle and then they fit right in the holes. I used some glue, it looks a bit ugly now but it can be cleaned up with a little sanding later.
Now we let the joints and glue dry. The next step for us, after waiting, was to take the table base to the destination and flip/place the top.
Top Reveal
At this point we had let the top cure for around a month. A week would have probably been enough, but with life and everything else going on it got to sit and cure a little longer than necessary. Here’s what it looked like when we flipped the top over.
Okay… I’m not going to lie - when we flipped this top over (man, it was heavy), my heart sank and I thought ouch. The gray is a bit light… and what in the world could have happened with the mesh? Obviously the grid from the mesh was showing through, but why? I never saw or read anything about this in the research I had done. My first question was - is this permanent or will it fade with time? It was time to do some more research. After a while, I figured out our project had become the victim of concrete ghosting, which is apparently a somewhat common problem. After all the research, it seems that the ghosting was permanent, however there were a few options to try and hide it.
The first option was to add a feather top finish to it. Basically, this would allow us to add a thin layer of concrete to the top of the big chunk of concreate to give it a “facelift”. We didn’t like this option as we felt there was a risk that the top could scratch or break easily. We want this table to last a long time and we don’t want the top to break or fade easily. The second option was to get a concrete wet polisher and polish the top to see if the gridlines would blend with the water and the current concrete. This option was appealing as we had planned on polishing it to a smoother finish anyways, so we accepted this as our next step in the process. We purchased a DeWalt polisher and polished the top, moving to higher grit with each pass. It did make the table look slightly better, but we just didn’t like seeing the lines still. This is what it looked like.
We did have a third option. This option was to utilize a concrete dye. We chose the Ebony color as it was the closest to the dark gray we were hoping to achieve. Here is my better half applying the dye.
This is what it looked like after it dried and we cleaned it. Much better.
And after a few days, we applied a matte clear coat, which looked like this as it dried.
Here we let the table dry for multiple days and prepared for the next step in the process, which was finishing the table base.
Finishing the Base
With the top finished, the final step was to finish the base. At this point in the process, we had a base built that held the concrete but it was raw, unfinished wood. It had been lightly sanded to avoid splinters when handling, but this step required sanding and finishing the wood. The first step was to sand the wood to a safe, yet still naturally rough finish. We also sanded out all of the glue at the joints as best we could, which turned out pretty well. Next, we tried sampling a few different stains on some scrap cedar, however we did not like how they looked at all. We decided to leave the color of the wood as-is in natural form, and use a few coats of Minwax Polycrilic Matte Protective Finish. You can see the difference of the natural wood and the wet coating in the first image below. The second image was taken during the drying process of the coating.
After the wood clear coat finished drying, we were finished. We picked out a rug and swapped the moving blanket out for the new rug. Here’s the finished product - we love it!
