Dinner Table

Here's a little story I'd like to tell about three bad brothers that I ... no, wait a minute, this is a story about a kitchen.

Several years ago, when we settled my father's estate, I decided I wanted to remodel our kitchen. I thought that was something he would approve of supporting financially. See, my father was a great designer, builder, and lover of the kitchen. He did none of these professionally, but he did them almost daily for himself and for us. When I say builder, he literally built a sawmill (sorry for those of you who already know this), cut down the trees on our property (pine trees, mostly), designed and built every structure on the property - our house and the camp buildings. I was always surrounded by lumber, the smell of sawdust, the sound of the sawmill, and pine boards, with their interesting knots looking back at me.

I knew I wanted to do open shelving in our kitchen because I wanted it to function like a workshop, laid out like my father's wood shop - everything in sight and reachable. This was a room for creating - a workshop. I wanted to use thick boards for the shelves and had an idea in my mind what they would look like. When I went back to the camp to look for extra boards, none of them looked right. I thought my memory was playing tricks on me.

During our remodel, I became Southern Surplus' most frequent visitor. One day, I was wandering outside and saw a stack of lumber, from the side, and knew I wanted to use it for shelves. What caught my eye were the lines on the side of the boards. I knew that's what I wanted to see - what none of the extra boards at camp had. When I looked at the lumber, I realized it was plywood with a laminate top - a pine laminate top though.

Now, I'm not too snobby, but I did have a little problem with the idea of using plywood for my kitchen shelves - with all the fancy cabinetry going on in kitchen remodels these days. I literally paid $5/board because there was water damage on the end of some of them.

I took the boards home, and we installed them as shelves. Since they had their own details that we very visible, I wanted to wait until they were in to make a decision about countertops. In the mean time, all the extra boards were laid out where the countertops would be.

I walked in one day, looked at them, and had a thought. Why not just use the boards as countertops too? A kind of butcher block vibe?

My wonderful contractor, Mitch Mullis, was - bless him - always game for my ideas and always figured out how to make them work. I am eternally grateful to him for that. We figured out an epoxy coating should do the trick, and we got them in.

I have loved my kitchen, and how it turned out.

Fast forward to a few months ago.

My father made a small kitchen table that my family ate every meal on. For some reason, long after I left home, he painted some sort of cross design on it. I have been needing a kitchen island of sorts, so I thought I'd bring in that table for the time being.

Lo, and behold, it all made sense.

Those lines I was so set on? Look at the side of the table.

The pine laminate tops with all their weird knots? Look the top of the table.

The epoxy finish? My dad figured that one out a long time ago.

Added bonus? We've started eating dinner every night in the kitchen around that table. Yes, my eyes are watering up a bit, even typing this.

I don't know exactly what the moral of the story is. In some way, it's "trust your gut, follow your heart, the Spirit knows where you are trying to go better than your mind."

But I think the underlying truth may be from Proverbs 22:6:

"Train up a child in the way she should go, and even when she's old she will not depart from it."