Tips on How to make your own Jar rah Wood Table

Solid wood furniture is not cheap no matter where you buy it. You can spend a lot of money on pine furniture and then when you come home you find it is not as solid as you first thought.  We bought a lovely (we thought) solid pine 6 piece extension dining table and chairs.

I was filling in a competition the next day and when I put the paper into the envelope I noticed that the table had marks on it. Oh boy I could not believe that I had ruined the surface on my brand new pine dining room sweet which we had paid $1500.

It had the impression of everything that I had written on the paper.  I then realized that I had to have something under any papers that I wrote on or it would leave the imprint again.  I was very disappointed after paying so much.

This is when my husband decided to make his own jar rah table.  At the time I thought it was a good idea, but did not realize how big a table he was thinking of making. 

We had 5 planks each piece was 75ml thick and approximately 15cm wide plus another one about 13cm wide by same thickness.  The length of each piece was 2.4meters long. Then we had a 4cm edging around on four sides as you can see in the picture. In total it measured about 90cms wide, from memory I am guessing these measurements.  In all honesty we no longer have this table as our son took it, because it was so heavy and we were thinking of selling our house and I did not want to have to shift it so asked our son to look after it.

We had each piece dressed by a professional. Then we drilled each piece about every foot, then we used biscuit doweling and glued each timber, once we had done this to the six timbers we clamped them with long steel clamps. This worked ok until my husband wanted to turn them over.

I am not as young as I used to be about 64 years old at the time and he thought I could lift this and help turn it over. Well we managed just, but oh boy it was heavy. He laughed wondering why I was complaining and puffing at the exertion it took.

Believe me the wood was heavy enough but with three steel clamps attached it was bl…y extra heavy. Anyway we finally got this part done and then we had to add the edgings; My husband insists that everything has to be done properly so these were then glued and biscuit doweled them into place. Believe me it will never ever fall apart. Again they were all clamped and had to be turned over again. Luckily our son turned up in time, so I quickly disappeared.

Then the decision to stain or use a wax finish had to be made. We decided to stain it. And at the same time our council decided to put a rail line right behind our house. Well the sand coming over a two meter brick back fence was unbelievable. We had it two foot deep in places and our pool was full of it.

Undeterred we made a plastic tent around the table and stained it we stripped it off three times and re-stained it. In the end we stripped it all off and went with the wax as we could not get rid of the sand.

It looked beautiful. I was so proud of my husband for all the work that he put in and decided it was worth it. Everyone asked where we had bought it. And even had offers to buy it, but we would not part with it; even though it took four of us to move it around our patio.

Even though it was a jar rah solid wood table, some of our visitors did not realize that you did not put wet glasses on the wooden surface. Yes I know, that’s part of life, but it was so infuriating to see people push the coasters back and put their glass directly onto the jar rah surface, and after all that work.

I ended up covering it with a sheet of clear plastic to protect the woodwork. Yet still be able to see the wonderful job that my husband had done on this table.

So if you want to know “how to make your own solid jar rah wood table” yourself I hope this article will help give you some tips on how to decide which way to go. What to do and what not to do. Good luck, I still think it was and is a beautiful table and well worth the effort.