A Piece of the Mass House

When I was in college my parents bought a house that they then rented to my brother and several of his friends over the next few years.  I lived there with 5 guys for about 1 month during one summer (and ps that was about as good of an idea as it sounds like it would be… hence only being for one month!)

But over the course of several years at KU, several of our friends lived in that house and it is a cute little yellow house on a busy street.  It was the perfect house for the guys to live in, and I have a lot of good memories there.  For several reasons my parents kept that house for several years after we were all gone from Lawrence.  They have sold it now, but during all that time it was discovered that the big tree in the backyard needed to be taken down.  When the guy came to cut down the tree, Mom had them save two sections of the tree stump for me in case I wanted to do something with them.

So for about 2 years those tree stumps sat in my garage (one is still there) waiting for inspiration to strike.  Well, one day inspiration struck in the form of a blog called The Art of Doing Stuff.  I’m not sure really how I got there, and it has been about 2 or 3 years since I found it, and my memory doesn’t last that long!

But she has a fabulous tutorial on how to do this, and since I did it pre-blogging I have no in process pictures for you all, but it is such a neat project and has a great memory to go along with it!

I did not stain mine because I liked the variation already in the stump.  And I will say it is not very easy to sand a round log, but I think the whole project took me only a few hours from start to finish.

And as you can see in the photo above, if you don’t have control over cutting the log so that it will be even, the adjustable legs from Ikea are key… otherwise this would be a VERY uneven table.  It is still mostly decorative, but pretty close to level.