My studio plan has always contained a very large table – a workspace for whatever thing I happen to be working on. I wanted it to be standing-height, since a lot of things are easier with a taller table, and I wanted it to be a surface I didn’t care much about injuring. So I decided that attaching legs to a door would be the simplest and least expensive solution. On one of many trips to IKEA, I acquired four adjustable-height table legs ($60), and on a trip to Habitat, a hollow-core door ($3). My mother kindly let me hijack her and her car to transport these objects, because IKEA is more fun with someone else, and doors don’t fit in my car. Once the table was home, I screwed the legs on, and flipped it over to stand on its own. And promptly flipped it right back over and unscrewed the legs. Each leg took five screws, too.

Did you notice the words “hollow-core door” up there? That means a door that’s basically air inside. Not entirely, there’s a grid structure that gives it some rigidity, but each actual side of the door is only a fraction of an inch thick. There are solid pieces of wood on all sides, but I’d screwed the legs into the door far enough from the edges that I hadn’t hit a single solid piece of wood. When I flipped the table over, it made a really worrisome creaking, cracking noise, like maybe that very thin piece of wood was not going to handle the stresses of holding table legs. So I moved them out to the very corners, making sure that at least two screws went into a nice solid edge. This time when I flipped the table over, it only made a little bitty creaky noise, like the screws that only went into the thin part weren’t thrilled, but the other ones were going to do their jobs. So now I have a table, and it is really useful, as I will describe in the next post. (Just don’t lie under the table to see all the holes from the first time I screwed the legs on!)

Here’s a shot of it covered in stuff – my studio is a bit of a disaster area at the moment, between the not-quite finished upholstery project, my mom’s birthday present, and Chaucer’s love for pillow stuffing.