Living in a Factory

As the title explains, I live in a factory. Hopefully, it's obvious that I don't live in a working factory. There are no machines chugging down the hall or neighbors yelling, "Quitting time!" However, the building was used as a gingham factory during the early 1900s and was recently purchased and converted into apartments. T and I are the first tenants to live in our apartment, and we LOVE it. T likes to say it's the nicest place he will live in his whole life. While I beg to differ (I am quite confident in my totally-rad house spotting skills now), his statement speaks to how fortunate we feel about living where we do. It's awesome and I cannot imagine us moving any time soon. Isn't it pretty?

Before we moved in, T and I already had most of the essentials we needed to join households. We had 2 beds, 2 couches, 2 TVs, way too many dishes and cookware, etc. Of course, there were a few items we had to buy (hurray Ikea!) and we received some generous donations from T's aunt and parents. (Thank you!) The one, key item we didn't know what to do about was the dining room table. Again, I scoured the internet, but everything that we liked was WAY too expensive (ie: Restoration Hardware).

The next best option was (obviously) to make it ourselves. T was enthused about the idea, and we set a plan in motion.

First, we explored the option of making our table completely out of beautiful hardwoord, but the man at the lumber yard immediately killed that idea. Maple costs $6/foot, and we needed over 100 ft of it. NO WAY. So, back to the drawing board. We did a lot of research, but living in our pretty, little factory proved to be the ultimate source of inspiration.  The high ceilings are not only decorated by thick wood beams, but they are also punctuated by shiny, round, silver ductwork. Why not combine the two materials to create our table? Wood for the top and dark piping for the base! We checked out prices and it worked! We are thinking of something like this...

Of course, this is a coffee table, but hopefully you can appreciate the concept.