the Walnut Diary

During the height of the Covid lockdown our granddaughter, a kindergarten student, wanted to attend her classes by Zoom, as offered by the Ottawa/Carleton School Board.

Access to a laptop and an iPad were easy, but her dad decided to bring her a large apple screen/computer unit and wireless keyboard from his office to further the classroom experience. Bet found a shaker chair upstairs which had proven too small and low for any adult, so it had been consigned to a corner of the upstairs hall under the sloped ceiling. For a desk we selected a two drawer cherry hall table which matched the chair pretty well, but lacked the necessary knee room.

Ada’s first class was to begin in an hour, so modifications to the table were hurried. A live-edged 2 1/2″ cherry plank gave up a few inches of its length . On the band saw I quickly made four substantial pads which more than covered the 2 1/8″ square ends of the table legs. Before I fastened the feet into place, I noticed that the shape of the feet made an ironic contrast to the veined ball and claw feet on the cherry coffee table in the same room, built when I had unlimited ambition and access to a Fine Woodworking subscription.

So I left the bark on the tapered edges of the feet, and oriented them toward the room. Then came Ada’s glue gun, one of her favourite tools. She placed a substantial gob of glue on the end of each leg, and then we pressed the feet into place and landed it on the floor before the mess had fully set. Everyone had a good laugh at the comic effect, but knee room under the table was now perfect. In came a computer monitor to cover most of the surface of the desk. Over the next few weeks we took turns hiding just out of camera view to watch the kindergarten classes.

My job today involved taking down the tree and setting the little table back on its original legs. One foot had fallen off during the Christmas shuffle, but the other three were still quite solidly adhered. I had mortised-and-tenoned the table together in 1985, added a coat of minwax, but then was interrupted by a call from Bet from the emergency room where she was receiving a cast for a broken wrist after a rink expedition. So the finish on the table never did receive any more attention. It just bravely took its place in a series of halls, holding gloves, phone books, and so forth.

I selected a medium chef’s knife and a hair dryer as the tools. While a chef’s knife has ample leverage for prying apart beef ribs, it had no effect whatever on the gobs of hot glue separating the three legs from their feet. The hair dryer as well had little effect upon the dry cherry until I used the knife as a heat sink to transfer energy to the glue. That worked, though slowly. Over the course of the session I developed a new regard for hot glue. Hide glue on antique furniture would have succumbed far more readily to the hair dryer than the transparent glue sticks.