ikea x Mari mashup being mashed up

After weeks of rather tedious but satisfying parts finishing, I finally started assembling the trusses for the table.

I realized I was a bit hesitant to commit to nailing or screwing the pieces together. It'd make holes in the wood, and there's no [easy] turning back.

Also, I was kind of lazy, not wanting to schlep back and forth to the basement with all these pieces, and all the drills and Dremels and tarps and stuff.

But I finally took the leap, rolled the carpet in the living room back, and just start to work.

Sure enough, the first nail I put in popped out of the piece below at a weird angle, and I had to hammer it out and redo it. [And glue and clamp the split piece underneath, which won't be visible anyway, because it ended up on the inside of a truss.

Sometimes, the nail will hit a predrilled hole, and it'll just sink through.

I was worried for a while about which way I should turn each piece. If I turned too many pieces with the holes facing inward, would the table lose some of its eventual Ikeaness? I didn't need to worry; the holey prefab repurposed nature of the wood comes shining through from multiple angles.

One thing I found, though, is that knots near the end of a piece of wood can screw you. Because the surrounding wood was so soft, the angle of one particularly gnarly knot kept deflecting my nails. I finally gave up, glued it, and left it for the drill&screw phase.

Next time, though, I'd watch when I cut the pieces, so that knots--or Ikea's toothy zigzag joints--don't end up near the ends.