Riki’s River Table

 

Riki’s thoughts…

This river table . . . I love it soooo much!! The pictures do not do it justice. Not only is it lovely with the juniper wood, the tinted epoxy, and the brightly-colored rocks, but what it represents is incredibly meaningful. Kelly wanted me to have a space, a place to claim, where I could leave my computer and didn’t feel it was in someone’s way. He worked incredibly hard to build it for me. He had some difficulties with it and had to re-do some steps until he got it as good as he knew it could be.

It was an incredibly emotional time for me as I knew that the project was not going smoothly. After a certain point, he didn’t want me to see the table until the big reveal when it was all done. Because of this, he didn’t show me the challenges he faced, and kept his words about them few.

I felt guilty that a project for me was causing him problems. But, I also felt honored that he was willing to work so hard to get it just right. It somehow made me feel valued by him, for his great efforts, and for the motivation behind them.

So, now in a home that the family wants me to feel like is equally mine, I have a special place to work and play and do writing and art and Bible study. It is a material gift and a social-emotional gift, a grand effort to give me belonging. I love it, and I love him for the how and the why behind the what.

Kelly’s thoughts…

This was a tricky project for me.  I did one previous river table and chairs, and it was one of the hardest projects I’ve done. Working with live-edge wood is difficult, the wood has its own character and structure to work with, and epoxy is just a mess.

I got the slabs from a guy who sells them out of a shed on N14 in Cedar Crest.  The slabs needed a lot of work, the bark had to come off and rot and dirt needed to be cleaned out.  Then I planed them, which is tough with such large pieces since I don’t have a cabinet planer.  So I used a sled for my router to plane it, even them up and get them to thickness.  Then there was a lot of sanding (and the juniper tends to sand unevenly).  Then the cracks and knots were filled with epoxy.  After that, I laid out the table configuration on a sheet protected by poly tape to keep the epoxy from sticking.  In this case some of the edges of the table are wood, other edges are resin, so there were additional layout issues related to that.  The next step was to seal all the wood surfaces with the epoxy and let that set for a day or two.  I thought it would be nice to have stones in a relatively clear river.  So the first pour of epoxy was multiple colors of blue swirled together.  Once that set, I placed the stones and poured the next batch which was slightly blue tinted but nearly clear.  That filled the river.  Of course, it’s nearly impossible to avoid some spilling and leaking out with a setup like this, so there was some monitoring and fixing as I went along.  Then I used a bar-top self-leveling epoxy to pour across the top as a last step.

Epoxy is really a mess.  The deep pour epoxy tends to leak out everywhere and drip, to seep into weird places and to bubble.  The bar-top epoxy is thick and messy and hard to stir without getting lots and lots of bubbles.  I messed up the first pour of bar-top and had to plane it off and try again, and I introduced new errors when I did that.  What a mess.  But I was able to recover, and the second pour went just fine.

Riki seems to like it, which is more than enough for me.  She deserves so much.