DIY Dining Table with Burned Wood Finish using a BernzOmatic Blow Torch

February 24, 2015 by Kaysi 27 Comments

Three years ago we bought the perfect dining table for our family. I loved everything about it and it worked perfectly for us for three years, then we moved into our new house. It worked but it made our dining room really cramped, so it just wasn’t working. I have been wanting to do make a new dining table for a while now but finally got around to it. I absolutely love how it turned it out and it was easier than I thought it would be. I decided that I wanted the table to have some character, so instead of staining it I lightly burned the surface of the wood using a BernzOmatic blow torch to give it a burned wood finish and I love how it turned out!

Here is our old dining table. We had the 8 chairs around it but eventually had to take out the leaf and it only fit 6 chairs. Not great when you have a family of 7 and you can only fit 6 people around the dining table. So we used the base and chairs and then we made the table top.

We headed to Home Depot and picked out some wood. I went with pine wood that was 1in x 8in x 8ft. We bought 6 boards and then cut the pieces to 7 feet long.

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To put them together we used a pocket screw (no glue was used). We first drilled all the pocket screws holes into the wood before screwing the pieces together. We made several holes in each piece of wood. The ends had 2-3 holes and then we did it every 12 inches or so.

Once the holes were drilled, then we screwed the pieces together.

As we were screwing them together, we screwed two pieces together and then put all 6 pieces together.

For the ends we wanted to make sure that the seam was very flat and secure, so we used clamps and a board underneath when we screwed it together. Sometimes it took some force to get the boards to lay flat.

For more support and to help with the flatness of the seams, we screwed some wood onto the

boards. The screws were put in around the seams to help make them look better and flatter.

Once we had all of the board screwed together, we used a router and rounded the edges. Make sure you practice on a scrap piece of wood before to find the right setting. We used the router on both the top and bottom of the table.

Here is the rounded edges from the router. So pretty huh? I love the rounded edges, gives it a nice finished look!

Now for the fun part! We got to burn the surface of the wood. I loved how this turned out. We just took the TS8000 BernzOMatic and burned the wood, going back and forth over the wood. We were about 2-3 inches away form the wood. Make sure to go with the grain because you can see lines if you don’t. The longer you hold it on a spot, the darker the wood so you have to make sure you do it evenly and lightly. The blow torch is awesome! You can change the settings on it so you can have a big flame or a smaller flame. The higher the flame the darker the color of the wood will be. The blow torch was so nice and easy to use, I am definitely going to be using it for more projects in the future.

Here is the dining table all burned. Doesn’t it look so cool?? I seriously love the color and the character the burning gives it!

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Now for the base. We used our existing dining table base. We added two new pieces of wood to make it longer on the sides. We had to drill holes into the wood so we could screw it into the table top. The key is not to let the screw go through the top.

Here is what the base looks like all put together. We also put on one more strip of wood in the middle to give it more support and make it more sturdy.

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Next we put on a pre-stain onto the table top. You need this for pine wood, it seals the wood and protects it.

We let the pre-stain dry for 15 minutes and then after two hours we put on the top coat. We used a clear polyurethane finish for the top coat. We used the satin finish to give it a little shine but not too much. We put on three coats. In between coats you have to sand the wood and then put it on.

Once the polyurethane dried we put the table top onto the legs and admired it’s beauty! I love how it looks in my dining room!

I made a table runner and a few decorations to go on it.

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And that’s it!! It was actually really easy to make. It took some time but nothing was really hard to do. And it turned out so well. It is so nice to be able to have all of our family sit at the table for dinner again! Plus it just fits so much better in the space we had.