I swear, my shop time is so infrequent it takes me forever to complete a project. But I had a decent block of time today and was able to do quite a bit!

First was to smooth the whole thing down – planing and sanding. Then I had to create a little “slot” in the top of one of the short aprons. This will allow for easy cleanup of legos; you don’t have to worry about clearing the lip, you just sweep them off into the tub through this slot. The technique I used is almost the same as the one I used on my step stool. I used a cardboard template to be sure the curves on the ends of the slot were the same.

Then I made a series of cuts to the line. It seems tedious but this only took me a few minutes.

I then took my mallet and chisel to it, and after the first pass it looked like this:

A second pass cleaned it up even more, and then I used a spokeshave and a rounded file (I don’t yet own a rasp!) to smooth it up.

Then it was time to finally glue the top on. This is perhaps an optional step but I decided to do it. There isn’t much good gluing surface (mostly the end grain on the legs) so I flipped it over and glued in some glue blocks on the bottom for a little extra support. Here’s the underside of the table so you can see what all I’ve done there. Notice I also nailed in (crude, I know) some brackets to help hold those leg assemblies together. Maybe unnecessary, but I’m paranoid like that.

And here she is after one coat of BLO/varnish/mineral spirits (in the midst of drying, thus the uneven look on the plywood). In the morning I’ll buff it out and add another coat, and then tomorrow night one more. That might be it!

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