A new restaurant has opened up in the suburb adjacent to us. A friend and I a couple of months ago went there to have lunch to celebrate her birthday and I was really taken by the use of recycled timber and retro furniture in their decor. I mentioned it to Benny and so one Sunday after we had had an exhausting 4km walk around the lake at the dog park we decided to go and check it out as a family and have a much needed beverage.
The first thing we noticed were the tables, which were higher than normal and constructed of three transport pallets put together to form two supporting sides and the top. Extra boards were added to the top to fill in the gaps and the whole thing was sanded til smooth. Four holes had been drilled strategically at each place setting presumably to hold a frosty beverage. Nicknamed “beer holes” they were the perfect size for a stubby or can and positioned directly over a crossmember so that they were supported about ten centimetres under the hole in the table. Genius!
The seating was a mishmash of up cycled beer kegs, a collection of new “retro industrial” metal stools, a few dilapidated and dated couches and a couple of old lawn chairs. Coffee tables were also made from pallets on casters and there were a number of other quirky tables scattered in various corners. The front counter and bar were decorated with spliced together recycled timber (presumably also from pallets), mirror and iron sheet. The overall impression was of outback verandah come shearing shed, it was warm and inviting as well as (to me) inspirational!
Rewind several weeks and after my first visit to Jimeez I had casually asked if Benny had any pallets laying around work that he could bring home for me for a project I wanted to make. As the resort he manages is undergoing a major refurbishment the place is teaming with tradies, skips full of rubbish, tiles, timber and concrete dust. Surely there were pallets in there somewhere. I was rewarded a couple of weeks later with about eight of them in various states of repair. The three best were selected to be the guinea pigs that would form the first of what I hoped to be three new outdoor tables.
A couple of weekends ago, Benny took the job on, with a little help from our neighbourhood five year old helper Tom. He secured the legs to the top, removed odd boards, stabilised the base and then filled in the top with some scrap boards scavenged from the pallets that were in disrepair.
This weekend it was my turn to do the finish off so I donned my proper personal protective gear armed with not one, but three different sanders (doesn't everyone have three of everything in their shed?) I began the laborious task of sanding the rough and ready boards into a smoother version that wouldn't leave all of our guests with splinters each time they propped up the table to join us for a drink.
Feeling a little like Tim the Tool-Man road testing a variety of sanding implements on a TV show, I began my task. First I tried sanding with the belt sander which certainly ripped into it the fastest but not long after I had started the third board it slowly wound down and called it quits never to start again. Next I tried The Renovator with a finishing sander attachment, which was slow but very precise. I swapped over to the palm sander which was the best by far, grinding off most of the roughness whilst leaving a numbing, pulsating feeling all down my hand.
This I then followed up with the finishing sander, which saw the table top smooth and ready for a coat of oil. In homage to Jamie Oliver we used what was handy and we had prolific amount of and that was, yes you guessed it, generous slugs of olive oil. During the previous week Benny had yet another trip to Bunnings for a hole saw big enough to create the holes for the stubbies to sit in and so the four holes were drilled to house the first beverages.
Luckily we had four stools that we had claimed instead of allowing them to be taken to the dump and we were ready for our first meal outdoors at a “proper” table. The table was gingerly loaded into the back of the ute and transported slowly up to the back yard from the shed. The neighbourhood children were quick to come and have a look at the finished project that they had helped us begin the week before. Many marshmallows were roasted by the kids in celebration of a job well done and many beers and wines consumed (only by the adults of course). Oh and I think we had dinner????
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