Behind the scenes with our table adventure!

Every business has a lot going on that customers never see and The Perfect Piece is no exception. Tons of work goes into purchasing both furniture and home decor which takes a whole team of employees that most people don’t even see.  

In our back room, there is a processing area where decor gets inspected, processed, cleaned, tagged and sorted. There is a grouping of tables shoved together into a large work area. The issue is the tables aren’t all the same height which leads to items falling or tipping or all sorts of problems.

Last week, we were contacted by a woman who was closing her business. She had a bunch of fixtures and furniture from the business she offered to us. As we reviewed her pictures, someone saw a giant work table that was used for workshops. Our back room people were excited about it. The thought of having one big table with one flat surface that was super stable was very exciting. When we asked how big it actually was, we were told that it was bigger than we had room for but also it was all wood so we could rip it down and make it whatever size we needed. It was very exciting (it’s the little things…).

So our delivery guys went over, took the table apart and brought it back to us. Melinda had already carved out Wednesday to rebuild the table into the size we needed. But when we opened the truck, there were more pieces than expected…

And it took more work to figure out how to put it back together…

And it was hot…

And every project is more complicated than you think it’s going to be.

But Melinda went to work with saws and pencils and tape measures and extra hands when she needed it. At the end of the day, we pulled the table top into the store through the front door and placed it inside for the night. The plan was to super quick finish it in the morning before customers came in because you actually couldn’t come through the front door because there was a giant table top in the way.

I was at Home Depot at 8 am the next morning finding bolts and washers and nuts that actually all fit together instead of the hodgepodge collection we collect. By the time I got back to the store, with a stop at our favorite Silver Stream Coffee, it wasn’t even 9 am but somehow we were behind schedule. It was all hands on deck to drill in screws, make some cuts with the saw, redo what we messed up, and get everything assembled.

At 9:55 am, we lifted this gigantic table top off the floor and pushed it into the back room just minutes before we opened the door for customers. 

Now we had another problem. We had a giant table top with no legs being held up by 2 people. What was the next step? Do we keep going, do we stop, how many people was it going to take to get legs on and lift it into place?!

We decided to keep going. Our designer, Halley, was out front taking care of customers which she just does magically. That left Melinda, Susan and I in the back holding tables, drills and whatever else we thought we needed. We drilled the 4x4 legs back onto the table which was sitting on it’s side. The bottom legs worked great, except sometimes we tripped on them as we walked. Then we drilled on the other legs, which ended up sticking out at about 5’ high because the table is now 6’ wide but sitting on it’s side. To which each one of us ran into the table legs at some point with our heads. It was soon decided that only 1 person moved at a time and it was someone else’s job to watch out so we didn’t hit our heads any more.

It worked… and no one went to the ER.

Once the legs were all attached to the table top, we had to pick it up and move it into place. This is a 6’x8’ all wood table with 4x4 legs and 2x4 braces and thick plywood. It’s heavy!! We called in Halley, thought of calling in our husbands, looked at the table, thought about calling our husbands again, and decided to try to move it with just the 4 of us and see how it would go.

We did it! We picked it up, flipped it right side up, and moved it into place. We felt so strong, so accomplished, and, again, no one ever went to the ER.

But that wasn’t the end of the project. We still had to reinforce the legs with bolts and paint the top with our One Hour Enamel Wise Owl Paint. Should we keep working on the project or set it aside to do our actual work?! You guessed it… we kept going. We were so close and we’d already spent so much time on the project. 

Who knew that our lives would be hijacked by the table project? By the end of day #2, it was finished.  Built, moved, bolted, and painted.  And it’s awesome! 

And it’s so funny how many sayings are true:

“A job worth doing is worth doing right”

“It takes a village”

“Measure twice, cut once”

“Girl Power!”

“It always takes longer than you think”

“It’s the little things”