Grain & Grove is a small furniture workshop in Hood River, Oregon. This is a dining table we built for a family of six, from a stack of rough fir boards. Scroll to follow it through our five steps, from the first visit to the day we carried it in.
The boards
Step 1 of 5
We come to your dining room with a tape measure and a notebook. How many of you eat here on a normal night, and how many at the holidays? Kids, dogs, chairs you already own? A week later you get a drawing and a fixed price, and nothing is cut until you say yes.
Step 2 of 5
You come to the shop and pick from our air-dried Douglas fir, all of it milled within 60 miles of here. We lay the boards side by side, match the grain across the top, and pencil a triangle across them so they go back together in the same order.
Step 3 of 5
Mortise and tenon where the legs meet the apron, drawbored with oak pegs. Breadboard ends keep the top flat while the wood moves with the seasons. No metal brackets, nothing that works loose in ten years.
Step 4 of 5
We sand to 180 grit, raise the grain with a damp cloth and sand again. Then three coats of hardwax oil, rubbed in by hand a day apart. It brings up the color of the fir, shrugs off water rings and can be touched up at home.
RawOiled
Step 5 of 5
We deliver it ourselves, carry it in, set it level on your floor and walk you through the care kit. The joinery has a lifetime guarantee: if a joint ever loosens, we come back and fix it.
Delivered
A fir dining table with a plank top, an apron and square legs, and a bench to match. Ten weeks from the first visit to the first dinner.
Want one for your dining room?
Book a free consultEverything is built to order for one room. Prices are starting points; your drawing comes with a fixed price.
72 to 120 inches, seats 6 to 12
10 to 12 weeks
From $4,800
48 to 96 inches, with or without a back
6 weeks
From $1,200
Around 48 by 24 inches
6 to 8 weeks
From $2,200
60 by 30 inches, drawers optional
8 weeks
From $3,400
Measured and fitted to your wall
10 weeks
From $6,500
Loose joints, new finish, old family pieces
2 to 4 weeks
From $250
Grey-washed pine with X legs and a through-tenon stretcher.
A long pale top built for a coffee shop's front window.
Mixed hardwood strips from a barn floor, nail holes kept.
What families say after the first few hundred dinners.
“We sat over the drawing with Mara for an hour before anything was cut. It's exactly the size our dining room needed.”
“They delivered on a Saturday, leveled it on our crooked old floor, and left a tin of oil with instructions.”
“Our kids have spilled everything on it. A rub of oil and it looks new again.”
Mara Lindqvist started Grain & Grove in 2009 in a rented barn outside Hood River, after ten years building wooden boats. Today it's Mara, two cabinetmakers and a stack of air-dried lumber.
We make a few dozen pieces a year, each one for a particular room. We'd rather build one table well than ten quickly, and we keep every drawing, so a piece can be repaired or matched decades from now.
The consult is free. We come to your home anywhere in the Columbia Gorge and the Portland area, or you can visit the shop and see the wood. Most tables are ready ten to twelve weeks after you approve the drawing.
Free delivery within 60 miles. Anywhere in Oregon and Washington for a fee.