Flea Market Cypress

     I like to randomly browse flea markets, it's something to keep me busy when I have nothing else to do and I always seem to find something interesting and unexpected. A few months ago I was in a local flea market that I usually don't go to, but decided I would since I was on that side of town. I ended up bringing home a 4-5" thick piece of rough chainsaw-cut cypress trunk. It had an awesome shape and I didn't really know what I was going to do with it, but at $15 I couldn't pass it up. I know the guy who works there through a previous job, I took the piece of wood up to pay him for it and it turns out that he knew the girl who's booth it came from. She was cleaning out an old barn that she recently inherited and the cypress was just laying there in a pile of dirt. Fortunately for me, she didn't have a use for it.
     So I took the wood home and started to sand it. After sanding and sanding and more sanding, I finally came up with a nice smooth surface and uncovered the natural wood grain. I loved it so much that I decided I had to go back to the flea market and buy the other smaller piece that I had seen before but didn't purchase. When I went back, my friend was working again. I asked him if he could give the girl with the cypress booth a call and see if she had anymore wood that I could buy from her. Unfortunately she just had two pieces, the larger one that I had already bought and the smaller one which was luckily still in her booth. So I bought the smaller piece and took it home to sand even more.
     I finally got to a point where both section cuts of cypress were both sanded until they were silky smooth...

          At this point I had some decisions to make. I knew I wanted to use them as a table top, but I didn't know if I should make two tables or stack them together into one table and which way would look best to stack them. After much deliberation and mind changing, I decided I would stack the cypress with the smaller piece on the bottom. I wanted to cover up the crack on the small piece and it just looked better with the big piece on top. So I laid them out how I wanted them and traced the outline of the small one onto the bottom of the big one. With both pieces upside down I applied wood glue to both sides, using small L brackets and multiple wood screws I lined the pieces back up and screwed it all together.
   To add a glossy, wear-resistant finish I used about 8 coats of polyurethane and lacquer, letting it dry between coats.
   Finally, I had to decide what to use for legs. I initially really wanted to use nice thick copper piping but after checking prices I decided against that. I kept going back and forth between different ideas (stump, branches, salvages table legs, etc.) but couldn't come up with anything I really liked. In the meantime at work, we were opening a new wine bar and wine tasting room and had an old copper bar top with 4 copper legs donated by a neighboring businessman. As it turned out, we didn't have a use for the copper pipe legs and since I had been doing a lot of the work on the new restaurant, my boss gave me all the extra copper (about 12' of 3" diameter copper pipe, 4 flanges, scrap flashing, and threading for the pipe)! Coincidence I guess, but I always seem to get lucky somehow...I'm not complaining. I cut down some of the piping to make 3 short legs and used the threaded flanges to attach the pipe to the bottom.
    This project in all cost me $25 (cost of the wood) and a few bucks to buy some extra sand paper. I already had everything else I needed in the garage. Another success!