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Hanging a dining room table top from a wall

1125 Views 10 Replies 10 Participants Last post by Lazyman, Feb 14, 2021

AlaGator

Discussion Starter · Feb 13, 2021 (Edited by Moderator)

Please forgive the discursive ramble. I tend to think better "out loud".

So, I have a monster of a dining room table that has been in the family for generations. It's a solid wood table with a beautiful persimmon wood veneer. When it's polished up and not covered in all the random crap that large horizontal surfaces seem to be a magnet for, it positively glows. Unfortunately, regardless of polish or clutter, it devours floor space. On average (pre-pandemic) I need to use it about once or twice a year for dinner parties or family gatherings. The rest of the time, it's just me in the house and I don't need a 40" x 120" table. I do, however, have a large blank wall in that room that I think it would look awesome hanging on. The table itself really is quite pretty to look at. The grain on that persimmon gives it almost a 3-D quality. Obviously there's a substantial amount of weight involved here, so my immediate thoughts were to use a french cleat. That way it could be easily taken down and put back into service when needed, with minimal hassle (obviously the legs would be stored separately and reattached).

However, this leads me to a conundrum. The table has an approximately 4" rail all the way around it. The rail is not sturdy enough to support the weight of the table laterally, so the mate to the cleat would have to be attached directly to the under side of the table. I'm assuming with glue and lots of little screws. But it seems like a 4" thick cleat would also act as a lever against the cleat mounted to the wall. Rather than just pulling straight down, like say, the back of a cabinet, it seems to me that there would be an additional force pulling out from the wall. I'm not certain that it would necessarily be enough to put the cleat off of the wall or the bottom of the table. But I'm also not certain that it wouldn't. The last thing I want is to be woken up by a 200lb family heirloom crashing to the floor.

I'd welcome anyone else's thoughts/experience on how to tackle this quandary.

Have a great day, all!

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Lazyman

· #2 · Feb 13, 2021

Does it have leaves to shorten it so that it takes up less space? If not, would you be opposed to cutting a couple of leaves out the middle? If done right, I doubt that anyone down the road would even know unless it is an unusual design or one that doesn't typically have leaves.

I assume that you plan to remove the legs to hang it? My only thought for hanging it would be to make an attachment that fits where the legs are attached to hang it on the wall but again, structurally, it might be hard to make it strong enough. You might have to reinforce those areas, though assuming the weight would be distributed to all for legs, perhaps 50 lbs each wouldn't be so bad? With four points of attachment it seems like there would less tendency to pivot and just be shear stress. BTW, It is not uncommon for very large paintings to weight 50 lbs with their frames.

Just spitballing.