2. Decorate your table!  This is up to personal taste.  Paint it your favorite color, different colors, slap some photos on it.  Make it yours.  

I did mine with paint and panels (see below) and some cool reflective/mirrored mylar (see description below also).

3. Legging
You’ll want to build the legs first, then attach to the table.  I made bookshelf legs (for cool extra storage) and went there hard, so that’s what I’ll describe:  

Take two of your 1’x3’ plywood pieces and glue/nail them together at the long sides, at a 90 degree angle.  Glue first, then nail along the seam to reinforce.  This forms a 3’ tall “L” shape.  Repeat this so you have four 3’ tall “L” shapes.

Add a base and shelves:
Take one 1’x1’ plywood piece and attach it to the bottom of the “L”, between the two sides: glue it to both sides of the “L” and reinforce with several nails.  Repeat for all legs.

Do the same with a 2nd 1’x1’ piece, about half-way up the leg (i.e. about 1foot 6 inches from the bottom).  Repeat with all legs.

You now have one leg with a solid base, and a shelf halfway up.

NOTE: You may want to do the base of each “L” at the same time you are making the “L” in the first place.  Adding the base will help the “L” keep it’s shape/angle as the glue dries, and will make the leg easier to work with.

4. Connecting the Legs
Lay the door on the floor, upside down (i.e. top surface against the floor).

Space the legs out on the door where you’ll want them.  Keep in mind you’ll want one leg towards each corner, but you’ll also want to make sure there’s room for people’s legs between table legs.

Attach each leg to the table using 4 L-brackets per-leg at 90-degree angles.

Once firmly attached, flip the table right-side up (you’ll want a partner for this!).

You have a table!  If you made bookshelf-legs, fill-em up!  Have some friends over and cook some pork.

Mine is pretty rad and works as a good work table/desk too.


You can see more pics here.

OPTIONAL/BONUS ROUND:
Between steps 1 – 2: 
Depending on the state of your door, you might need to clean it up a bit.  I sanded and scraped using CitruStrip and lots of elbow grease, as I wanted to have the original wood showing through.  If you plan to paint the entire piece, you can skip this (will save you lots of time and sweat).

Panels for Insets:
NOTE: Some old doors have inset panels, areas where the door isn’t flat but instead has a panel inset into the door at a lower level, often bordered by molding as part of décor.  This can of course make table-fying the door difficult, as you likely don’t want a table with divots.  Two suggestions:
1.     Once finished decorating, cover the entire table with plexi-glass which protects the decoration and also gives you an entirely flat surface upon which to table
2.     This is what I did: cut thin luan to fit the insets and glued those into place, making the table one level surface throughout.  This worked very well for me as the 4 added/glued-in panels became new places where I could add interesting splashes of color.

Lastly...
Take "Before" Pictures.  Because your blog will look much cooler that way.

Daniel Johnston is a singer song-writer and artist from Austin Texas.  He’s been a huge cult figure since the 80’s and had a dalliance with something close to fame in the early 90’s when Kurt Cobain wore one of his shirts on a big time music magazine.

I don’t honestly know the history well enough, but it seems in retrospect that Daniel might have been a precursor to the digital age of music sharing.  In the 80’s he would make tapes and albums and give them out to just about anyone.  These tapes got passed from person to person, often ending up in different parts of the country or other nations just through hand to hand contact, like some kind of musical virus.  Lacking the equipment or resources to mass print copies of his music, when Daniel ran out of albums and someone asked for one, he would go home and re-play the entire album to record it, just so he could give the person a tape.  He also did the drawings for his album art.

One of Daniel’s albums is called “Hi, How Are You?” and has a drawing of a frog, as if it is asking you.  This is the image Kurt Cobain was wearing.  There’s something about this phrase and Daniel’s life that feels very poignant to me: there’s an openness to Daniel’s process of sharing, and to that question, that makes me really happy.

Daniel is Bi-polar, and spent a lot of time in the 80’s and 90’s, suffering a great deal because he was mis diagnosed or mis-medicated.  He once flew in a small plan with his father and almost crashed them.  Both were lucky to survive.  He’s now found a much more even keel and by most reports is doing well, if living quietly in a small Texas town.

There was a point in my life when Daniel Johnston scared the hell out of me because I thought I was too similar.  That something was wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed and that I could end up in pretty bad shape.  (It hasn’t helped that a few people have compared me to him!).  Ultimately though I’m starting to be ok with that and I’m starting to be ok with myself.  I love his work because there’s a really simple beauty to it that I hope to match with certain things I do.  There’s one song of his, probably his most well known (because every single person on earth has done a cover version of it) that never let’s go of my heart and honestly it’s hard not to cry whenever I hear it.  There’s a simplicity and directness to it, and openness, a “Hi How are You?” about it.

The song is called “True Love Will Find You In the End.”  It's been covered by all kinds of folks from Beck to Wilco.  And you can hear Daniel’s version here.

I named this blog “Hi How are You” because I hope my work can have the same effect that Daniel’s work has on me.  I hope it can be direct, honest, I hope it can be passed from one person to another like an old tape.

You can check out more info about Daniel and his work here.

Or see a documentary about his life (which I recommend) called “The Devil and Daniel Johnston”:

I really liked it but wasn’t sure if it was done.  I showed it to DMS and she said “Really?  A vagina?”

So I wasn’t done.

Essentially that first draft was what you see now, but with none of the black.  Where the black is, about 50% of that was just white canvas.  Another 25% was the original green, yellow or pink, which I blacked over.  And the last 25% was the dark blue, which I really didn’t like once I’d added the black.  All in all I love the start contrast of that black with the much softer colors.  I think its rich.

So that’s how you make something NOT a vagina.  Add black.  

I mean, really?  Vagina?  You go there?  Sure it’s a fun series of swirly shapes, and a vagina is ALSO a fun series of swirly shapes…

But, really?

About 10 days later we had wound thru the country and ended in Jeruselam where we visited the Western Wall or wailing wall on the Sabbath.  The wall itself is 2000 years old and is nicknamed the address of God.  People of various faiths from around the globe come to pray here, and it’s traditional to write a prayer on a piece of paper and shove it in the crevices between the huge stones, believing that God will receive the message.  I prayed here with my friend, and put my own written prayer in the wall.  For obvious reasons they don’t allow cell phones or camera use within a certain distance of the wall.  I was lucky enough to have a decent zoom and was able to catch these men at prayer.  I don’t know what it means or why, but this has become a sacred image to me.  When I look at it I believe things can be beautiful.

The solution came from a happy accident.  I was painting my balls (see post) in the basement and spilled a big pot of red paint.  You can’t exactly sweep paint so it was either use or let waste.  I used.  I grabbed a canvas I had nearby, among several I had just bought, and did a kind of curving shape on it, from one side curling around to another.  Liking that shape, and seeing the other canvases handy, I immediately thought “big picture” and grabbed a second canvas where the curling red shape would continue to swirl over from the first to the second.  Doing this I loved the way they looked next to each other, but they felt “not done”.  And there were swirls that went off these canvases that led to nothing.  So I grabbed two more canvases and continued the same.  The result: a pattern of four canvases, in pairs slightly offset from one another, that create a single piece with red tubes slithering from one canvas to the next to the third and back.  

I not only used all the spilled paint, but filled 4 canvases, creating a piece I never would have in other circumstances.  And, being 4 big canvases, it just happened to cover a good portion of that ugly ugly wall!

After living on the stairs for two years, the bottom two paintings got a little fuffed and dirty (which you can see pretty clearly above!).  So I added some color over the white area and am actually much happier with the piece now!

I’m curious to keep changing this up here and in future places as all four canvases can be rotated (all have to rotate the same way) new directions to create slightly new views of the whole.  Finished piece, but still loads of possibilities.