Building a Gaming Table [Part 1]

For many years we have been talking about building a table for our gaming group.  About organizing the godawful amount of miniatures in our host's basement.  Well, last week I finally made up a list of stuff I may need to build a table and Kevin, the person whose house we play at, said he would bankroll the whole thing.
Not that this hasn't all been done before.  But today I called him up and said we should go to Home Depot and buy this stuff.  So  that's exactly what happened.  We bought it and loaded it up in and on my Jeep.

A few feet of twine later and we were all set for the ride back to his house.  Not a very comfortable ride having  to hold the stuff on the roof down when it's windy and 30 and you have no room to move about thanks to the 2x4s, but hey we got back safely.

So, as I began to cut up lumber, as seen below, Kevin and another gaming buddy of ours, Andy, began the process of organizing the hordes, or hoards, of models and armies spread throughout the basement.  So much for playing some BFG.

Kevin's father has a good selection of tools and is kind enough to let us use them, with one rule, no drinking and power tools.  Reasonable enough and not something we were planning on mixing anyway. First thing to do was make the legs, because every table needs legs...

Here you can better see the frame, still needs a bit more under the plywood though.  Some drink holders too, and a shelf there on the bottom for storage of something.

And the top, we've got some nice 2" pink insulation foam as the gaming surface and some 1"x5" pine board for around the outside. This will leave a nice border and keep what's on the table, on the table. Still a lot of work to be done, but it was very nice to finally get started on something like this.  We're going to leave the board at 8'x4' for when we decide to play larger games, but will have some surface feature which will mark off 2' from either end for a 6'x4' play area as well.

To be continued...