Elijah's Big Surprise

It looks a lot like Christmas around here lately. (Well, the living room looks like Christmas. The rest of the downstairs looks more like Santa's workshop, with wood, paint, glue, etc everywhere.) I decided last week to try my best to make a Thomas play table for Elijah. He now has enough track and trains that we regularly make fantastic tracks, but Elijah has the hardest time playing with them because of the soft carpet. The pieces get disconnected easy, and Elijah has a terrible time trying not to step on pieces or sit on them, both of which only break them up worse. Since we didn't want to spend the money on a store-bought table, I thought I'd try to make one. So Friday night when I got home from teaching, I went to Lowe's (about 1 minute from our house; Elijah later called it "the blue Target") and bought some drill bits, drywall screws, and a 48"x32" piece of plywood. Saturday morning, after Cacey made us pancakes and eggs, I went to Michael's arts & crafts store and bought lots of stickers and acrylic paints. When I got home I immediately started painting what would be the surface board (as Elijah napped upstairs).

As you can see below, I got a pretty shade of acqua to be the sea, running along the edge of the island of Sodor.

Below is the finished, dried surface board (Saturday night).

Here I have added some white foam to the waves:

These are the legs, which are each made of two 1"x2" boards cut at 14.5", which I first glued together, nailed together, and screwed together, and then painted dark, engine red (late, late Saturday night).

Sunday morning I got up very early to detail the legs to look like brickwork. It actually took me all day to finish all four of them since I was stopping to do other things as well.

Here are my other 1"x2" boards for the inner frame and some 1"x4" boards for the outer frame. It took me almost 2 hours to sand them all down good, which I regretted because the cold wind was knocking my socks off all afternoon.

Below is my ghetto sawhorse for painting the outer frame, which I did Sunday night as we watched the Oscars. (We were cheering when Slumdog Millionaire won 8 awards!) Basically, the house got turned into a workshop, because I couldn't take the cold and the wind anymore.

Here are some painted boards. Honestly, the blue came out a tiny bit lighter than I originally wanted, but it wasn't drastic enough to worry about. (I was so excited to go to Lowe's with some Thomas materials so they could match up the perfect Thomas blue---just like in those commercials they play constantly during baseball and football games---but they couldn't get the machine to calibrate correctly, so we had to eyeball it anyways....)

Here is the completed inner frame, which Cacey helped me assemble Monday morning (I canceled my office hours to get it done). All the while, Elijah never had any idea what was going on. We kept telling him I was making a surprise for him and that he would have to wait to play with it. As he was watching me, he kept asking, "Are you making me a house?"

Here is the inner frame connected to the legs, with which Cacey also helped me tremendously. (My bookshelves are looking a little sparse here because we made several stacks on the floor to hold up the corners of the frame until the legs were attached all around. They're full again toward the bottom of this post...)


Then we flipped it over so I could attach the surface board to the inner frame and legs.

Flipped right-side-up:

I had to stop working and go teach Monday afternoon, and Cacey helped me hide it in our bedroom upstairs. When I got home at 6 PM I began work again (upstairs and behind closed doors now). Cacey helped me attach the outer frame to the table.

This is the table with the outer frame, but still incomplete. I sprayed some more primer over the screw-heads and then had to repaint the outer frame with one more coat just before porkchops.

Now here is the almost-finished product, back downstairs, at about 8 PM. Elijah was upstairs getting "a nice, warm bath" (as he says).

Then, while Elijah was getting into his PJ's upstairs, I put on the decals and hurredly assembled some track. (There is a similar arrangement of stickers on the sideboard opposite this one.)


The unveling was extra special for Elijah because there was a special new piece: a working drawbridge with stop-and-go lights and a whistle noisemaker, which he's wanted desperately for a while, and which I bought first of all (without telling him) since I knew it would work so well with the table. (As you can see in the top-right corner of this picture, I made this particular track in a big hurry, as it was almost 9 PM by now, but we have here our very own "bridge to nowhere.")

This is Elijah trying it out, a little apprehensive. But it didn't take long before he was running circles around it, repeating over and over, "I looove this!"


At a little past 11 o'clock, when I pried Elijah away from it, which almost brought him to tears, I was carrying him upstairs and he said, "I love this that you made for me, daddy."