Breakfast Nook Table

I built a table, or rather, I built a tabletop to fit in our breakfast nook. When we moved into our house, the breakfast nook had some really ugly formica stuff from the 1970s. And this was not hip 1970s stuff. It was nasty 1970s stuff.


So I bought a cherry dining table on craigslist.org. The tabletop was oval originally. I cut the table to the right dimensions to fit the breakfast nook (complete with benches advertised as having accomodated Woodrow Wilson's intelligent butt at some point in their history). We painted the table white to match the benches and trim in the kitchen.


I then screwed cement board underlayment to the top of the table and trimmed the edge with oak and polyurethaned the oak. The oak was cut using a mitre box and a hand saw. I tiled the top of the table with bathroom tile, then used flexible grout around the edges between the tile and oak trim. Apparently the oak expands and contracts, and this will cause cracks in normal grout over time. Bacteria can then hang out in the cracks. I grouted the rest of the table normally. It has served us well for nearly a year.