Abstract
In phylogenetics, we often use “tree” as a metaphor. But when one crashed through our roof, the difficulties that come from tree bisection became all too real, but a reconstruction followed… leading to a table (see Results).
Introduction
On January 16, 2022, a tree in our backyard crashed and fell through our roof. The soil in our area is rich in clay, and trees often have shallow roots. We’re also on a fairly steep hill. Fortunately no one was injured, we had insurance, and the roof supports in the (literally) impacted area were overbuilt and prevented the tree from going deeper into the house.
We decided to make a big live edge table from the remnants: turning lemons into lemonade and all that. Plus, we (especially pre-covid) liked having lots of people over for holiday meals, especially given how in academia many people have to move and leave behind their family and friend support structure (in kindergarten, my son drew a picture of a lot of people at a holiday table. “Who are those people?” I asked him. “Those are the postdocs,” he said).
Methods
A local company removed the tree, sawed it into slabs of about 14 feet long and 30 inches wide, and let it dry for a couple of years. They brought back the wood and stacked it in our garage. I bought beefy sawhorses and hired people to lift two of the best slabs and bring them into our dining room where we thought the table would end up. Bark was removed from the exposed sides (it will eventuall fall off anyway) and frass from insect galleries removed with a Dremel. I then sanded (first with a random orbital sander, then with a new belt sander) the top, bottom, and sides of the boards with increasingly fine grit – this took a couple of months (in spare time – it was perhaps 20 person-hours). I filled holes with resin (TotalBoat thickset deep pour epoxy resin) after first (trying) to seal all cracks and holes below the board with resin tape and then painter’s tape, using a heat gun to remove bubbles. Finally, I applied multiple coats of satin Minwax water-based wipe-on polyurethane, which preliminary experiments showed could resist damage from things like hot mugs of tea.
Family consultation resulted in a new decision to use a room 30 feet away as the new dining room. I bought more sawhorses, and my daughter and I set up a system where we would slide a finished slab from two sawhorses onto a third, then move the first sawhorse to next in line, and so forth to “walk” the slabs into the correct room. Steel legs purchased from Etsy designed for slab tables were attached to the bottom of the slabs to form the table, the sawhorses removed, and the table… started listing. The attachment points on the legs were not robust enough. We lifted the table back onto sawhorses. We hired a local blacksmith to construct much better legs, and he built and attached them. The legs are set at a height accessible for wheelchair users (he used 28” knee clearance height) so the table works universally; this with the slab thickness led to the table surface height being slightly above the US normal height of 30”, but it works well so far. While there was briefly a trend for “river tables” as live edge tables, where the middle between two slabs would be formed of an epoxy “river,” we decided to leave a 1 cm gap between the slabs instead – wide enough to allow crumbs to pass through.
Results
We have a table!
Discussion
We now have a large, seemingly solid table capable of seating over a dozen people. The water-based polyurethane coat should be non-toxic in use (and was not bad to apply) and did not change the color of the wood; there is a bit of a plastic feel but not bad (other options considered were things like bartop epoxy (think of the plastic coat on tables at places like Chili’s) and shellac (could require more maintenance than we wanted)).
I didn’t track costs throughout, but while I love likelihood methods in my research, in my home life my core principle is parsimony. The resin was ~$80, polyurethane was $60, random tools consumed (the belt sander did NOT like sanding resin) were also about $60. The table legs including install were $1350, by far the biggest cost, but also very much worth it. The wood itself “fell into our lap” but cost to remove it from the house and mill it was a few thousand dollars (but we still have multiple slabs to use for other projects). My guess is the table was overall under $2,000, if we don’t count my labor (which, according to NIMBioS rates, is $208/hr – always a fun number to quote to one’s kids when you have to wait for them in the car for pickup). I think the cost is still somewhat high, but my brain is still calibrated for IKEA furniture; I’ve been told that people at my life stage (mid-40’s professionals) should be more calibrated for things like Crate & Barrel furniture, where this would be on the low end (and probably not be hand made of hardwood and steel).
Caveats
The wood dried for long enough that it should be done warping. A professional woodworker would have run it through a planer to make it perfectly flat; a skilled amateur would have made a router sled1 and flattened it that way. It would be a lot of routing, and I also wasn’t confident that a sled and support system I made would be robust enough over this distance to actually provide an improvement. So while the tables are smooth, they are slightly warped. Attaching them to beefy legs has helped a lot with this.
The wood had a lot of holes and cracks. I have sealed most of them, but I still see new ones post install. I may seal again; the thing I worry about is adding resin and then sanding it down and having to apply the many layers of polyurethane again.
Our current chairs don’t match the new table well. One future improvement might be to make new matching chairs or benches.
Conclusion
Trees are made of wood. Tables are made of wood. With convergent research, we can convert one to the other.
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Footnotes
A router in this context is basically like a drill, but instead of moving the spinning bit down to make a hole you generally move it sideways to remove wood next to the bit. A router sled is a tray on rails for the router to ride on so it does not move vertically; anything above the bottom of the router bit gets removed.↩︎
Citation
@online{o'meara2026,
author = {O’Meara, Brian},
title = {Empirical {TBR}},
date = {2026-11-14},
url = {https://brianomeara.info/posts/empirical_tbr/},
langid = {en}
}