I have a found furniture story!  I’m such a grown up.

About a month ago, the lady and I were starting our move.  We needed a dining room table and were having trouble finding one.  We wanted something rustic and big which you can find at a place like Restoration Hardware (but usually come with a $2000 price tag).  I was at my parent’s house in CT poking around for things to steal - my parents love antiques…everyone in CT loves antiques - when my mom suggested I take a look at some of the stuff in our barn. 

The barn at my parents’ house is not a nice barn.  It’s about 200 years old and really looks its age.  For 27 years now I, along with anyone else who has ever been to my parents’ house, have wondered how it’s still standing.  It looks like a powerful fart could topple the whole thing, but it still it stands through annual hurricanes and many a robust fart. It houses anything we don’t have a place for in the house: disused exercise equipment, my dad’s old surfboard from the 60’s, dozens of rusted old bikes, etc.

Anyway, my mom and I are poking around in there when we see this old work bench.  It’s covered in half an inch of shit - mouse shit, probably, but maybe some raccoon shit as well - but we pull it out and start to clean it off.  The table top is gouged and splattered with ancient paint but when we flipped it over we saw pristine wood underneath.  So we called up our carpenter friend, Tom (he of the giant coat hanger), and he came over for a consult.  Immediately, he saw potential.  He declared the table to be at least 100 years old judging on the width of the pine planks and the nails used to hold it all together.  Apparently, pine planks more than a foot wide (two of which make up the table top) haven’t been available since we ran out of big pine 100 years ago. He whisked the table away to his workshop.

A month later, Tom delivered a perfectly re-worked table full of dovetail joints and little fixes here and there.  It is practically unrecognizable from the mouse-shit covered work bench my mom and I dragged out of our barn.  And thus ends my found furniture story.

If you have some serious carpentry needs in CT, Tom is your guy.  He doesn’t work cheap but he is such a professional and so skilled that he literally gets upset when he sees a piece of shoddy carpentry.