A family member commissioned me to build them some end tables and lamps for the living room of their house. The house is close to the beach and there are a lot of beach themed items so I wanted to try to make something within that theme. In my internet research I really didn’t see much that inspired me and was still functional. Most stuff incorporated glass which I really didn’t want to get involved in.
Eventually, while just searching for beach images looking for inspiration, I came up with a design that had the tables looking like docks or piers. The table would have to sit on round logs with lateral planks and incorporate some rope somehow.
I started to try to source rounded logs for this project – I didn’t have a lathe or an easy way to make square store-bought wood rounded and Home Depot and Lowe’s don’t sell rounded logs. The options online were pretty thin and prohibitively expensive. I decided to buy 4 x 4’s and shake down the corners to give them a “rounded” feel. I bought 4 x 4’s at Home Depot. The 4 x 4’s I went with came wet due to pressure treatment (because I had’t yet learned my lesson about not buying pressure treated wood). In order to round them I built a little jig for the table saw that held the 4 x 4’s at a 45-degree angle so that I could rip them down the length and shave off the long edges. I ran them through this process several times, shaving off more and more. Eventually the 4 x 4’s were rounded enough to resemble a pylon on a pier.
After this I went about constructing the the plank surface. This was simply some 1-by boards ripped down and attached to a base. The best idea I could come up with to attach the rounded pylons to the squared planks was to take a section of 1-by and cove out a large section so that the pylons would nestle into this groove. I drilled a pilot hole through the groove so that I could secure the pylons from the back with long wood screws. I added some cast iron dock cleats for effect.
For the lamps I created rounded logs in exactly the same way. I bore out a hole down the center of the longest log. Using a couple lamp kits I bought from Amazon, I threaded the wire through the longest log and affixed the lamp head to the top. All three logs were screwed into a base and I wrapped the columns with some rope and added a cast iron anchor for decoration.
