THE MID CEYLON-TURY AT HOME: BALAGALLA, FORMAL DINING SPACE

Even though most Sri Lankans eat at a kitchen table, like the one I showed before, in large estate homes like this there's usually a large, formal dining table too. This is where important guests or outside (non-family) visitors are served meals. Dining is a very important ritual when guests come to visit in Sri Lanka, so households try to keep a good-sized table for the purpose, no matter how small their homes might be.

This is the only truly mid century style dining table I've ever seen in Sri Lanka! It's even more magnificent in real life:

At the other end of the table stands the little display cupboard with all the important family photos, including my husband's uncle's 1950s wedding photo!

When we visited, we ate lunch at the kitchen table (shown in the previous post), which was much more cozy and convivial, but I can just imagine being served a huge formal meal at this table - truly a treat!

THE TREE

When I was growing up in our family home in California, there was a beautiful old tree in the front garden, right outside my window. I loved watching the change of seasons played out in its leaves, and the little birds who built nests in its branches. It was there when we moved into the house in the early 80s, and since it was so old we thought it must have been around since the house was built in 1947.

Sadly, a couple of years ago it just died, and came crashing down in a bad winter storm:

My mother paid a neighbor to cut it down. I wanted to save it, so I asked for it to be sawed into stumps that we could use in our own home, one day (we had not bought our house at that time).

Since I don't have any DIY experience, I looked online for tutorials for making a tree stump into a side table. I found the best one here, on The Art of Doing Stuff blog. It was wonderful: very detailed and didn't look too hard!

First, we let the stump dry out for over a year in the hot summer sun. Then, we pried off the bark with a prybar:

With the bark off, it looked like this:

Then we sanded it with an electric sander. You can do this by hand, but since our stump had so many bumps we just didn't have the time to do that.

When sanded, it looked like this:

Then, we decided to fill in a big gash running down the stump with wood filler. We could have left it alone, but worried about bugs coming out of it one day. I wasn't thrilled with the filled-in effect, but in the end it wasn't too bad:

Even though it was a pale shade of filler, it still stood out a bit:

Then, we sanded down the filled-in gaps:

Afterwards, it looked like this:

Then, we sealed the entire stump with several coats of Minwax "Polyshades", or stain-and-polyurethane in one can. This took over a week since you have to let the stain dry out for at least a day before applying another coat.

Finally, we decided to paint the top since the filler was so prominent there. First, a coat of primer:

 

Followed by some leftover paint, and voila, here's the finished tree stump (side without the gash):

And here's the side with the filled-in gash. Though it's visible, it doesn't look bad:

 

It stands next to our mid-century rocking armchair: 

I adore this little stump table, and am so thankful that the tree that stood outside my window will now be with us forever. It's more than a piece of furniture -- it's an old friend.