As much as I love Kate, completing tasks is arguably not one of her strengths. So even though when she moved into this apartment in April of 2011, she had plenty of vision about how she wanted it to turn out, she hadn't quite gotten there by the time I came onto the scene in September. Which is a good thing in this case, because it's given us the opportunity to finish some things together, and make sure they suit both of our tastes.
Case in point: the dining room table.
Over the summer, Kate bought a cast iron sewing table base at a store in Williamsburg called, of all things, Junk.
The first time I came to her apartment and saw this sitting in the bay window surrounded by chairs and with a vase on top, my first thought was, "Huh. That's a really small table." I didn't want to offend her, though, so I kept quiet for a while.
When it came to light that we were both seriously interested in home design and decor, she asked if she could run her dining room table design by me. I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that she had more plans for this rickety little base with pieces of rotting wood screwed all around it.
She had originally invisioned pairing it with a mirrored top, surrounded by a wood trim to hold it in place. But the more we talked about it (talking details is something we do best), the more complicated it seemed to get. How thick would the wood trim be? Would it be level with the mirror, or would there be a lip? There would probably be a lip, and would that make it hard to fit plates? What if someone dropped a knife and shattered the tabletop?
I'll admit that I was never a huge fan of a mirror-topped table. It felt a little glitzy and fussy for my taste, which tends to be homier. After a lot of back and forth, we came up with the idea of some kind of marble, either a white with grey veins or a soft grey that matched the chipped paint on the base.
We even considered scrapping the DIY table and buying this one at ABC Home, which we fell in love with while window shopping one day.
But after a bit of research, we discovered that our custom table (with a slightly larger top) would be less than half the price!
So one weekend, while breathing the country air in Lloyd Neck, we drove ourselves to a marble yard and chose a simpe white Cararra marble that we had cut to a 32" round. We chose a honed (matte) finish and a simple edge to add a clean, modern feel to the antique base and our otherwise fairly feminine, detailed apartment. We also wanted to incorporate a more modern feel into the table so it would harmonize with our white Paul Loebach chairs.
We bought some epoxy and a caulking gun at the hardware store, found the center of the marble top, and glued those babies together one night. We let it set for 12 hours, and the next morning, we had a more beautiful dining room table than either of us could have imagined!
