Roger Currie, a resident of Carman, has transformed a piece o history into something beautiful. Twenty-five years back, he faced the aftermath of a storm and cut down an oak tree. Now, that very wood is shaping memories around his dining table.
Currie recently finished his project and is now enjoying all its comfort of his home.
He took the tree to Homewood and got it milled into quarter-cut oak. Currie also made a smaller oak table in 2005. Now that he’s gifted the original table to his daughter, he recently made a dining room table for his house.
“It took 80 hours to build this table, off and on over several months,” said Roger Currie. “Nothing ever goes as planned, and sometimes you have to adapt on the go, and things change, and that’s what happened with this project. I had antique table slides where I wanted the legs to go, but they didn’t fit, so I had to pivot and have the extensions come in from the end.”
The new dining room table is an inch and a half thick of oak, measures 44” x 60” (extends to 84” with both extensions in), and is very sturdy, weighing about 150 pounds without the legs.
“It was a challenging project, but I was able to do it,” said Currie. “I’ve built other things before, but this included many new things as I was new to bent wood and to epoxy the knots, where the other table I had built left the knot holes. But all in all, it turned out pretty good, and I’m quite pleased with the finished product.”
