After Dan Wellens sold his first table on Craigslist, things “kind of snowballed,” he says. The proprietor of Country Tables is now an HGTV cast member and a spokesperson for the International Woodworking Fair (IWF).
In the past decade, Dan has built about 5,700 tables. At one point, he had four employees, but “I hated it. It just wasn’t fun anymore,” he says. Now, “It’s back to me and my CNC.”
Although he started out making custom tables from demolished barnwood, Dan now considers himself a small manufacturer. “You cannot make custom furniture at a reasonable price and expect to thrive,” he says.
“When you have a flat piece of 8/4 wood that’s 96″ by 45” wide, your job’s halfway done. I can have the CNC running while I’m wide belt-sanding tabletops,” Dan says. “I can come in on a Monday, glue five tables up; on Tuesday, I can start sanding down; on Wednesday, I can start putting on varnishes; and then Friday, I can start adding the legs.”
The CNC is a key element of the “Akin,” Dan’s favorite among his table styles. “What I love about this style, is it’s made 100 percent on the CNC,” he says. “There’s not much labor involved, except for routing the inside.”
Although he’s recently started outsourcing metalwork to a welding shop, for a long time Dan did everything in house. “I took a lot of pride in that. But with business, sometimes you have to relinquish a little bit,” Dan says.
He’s learned other business lessons, too. He calls building a kiln and a sandblasting booth “two of my biggest, most expensive mistakes.” An idea that paid off was pitching his work to HGTV designers. On a friend’s advice, Dan started looking up shows’ designers and asking if they’d be interested in his tables. Several have been used on HGTV.
“Most people don’t turn down a table, especially when it’s fun and creative,” he says. His tables are often shipped to a filming location, used to stage a set, then returned to him for later sale.
That led to the hosts of Renovation 911 contacting Dan to build for their show about restoring damaged properties. HGTV pays for a piece that the homeowners keep. “It’s a little more sentimental, and normally it’s a dining room table,” Dan says.
His involvement with IWF was more serendipitous. In 2022, he was invited to participate as an influencer and subsequently invited to become a spokesperson for IWF. He views his contributions to IWF’s Network News publication and plans for classes at IWF 2024 as being a liaison between large tool manufacturers and garage woodworkers.
“The problem is, people get into woodworking, and they only know what’s at Home Depot,” Dan says. “Then they’ll dive into it a little bit more, and they’ll learn what’s at Rockler. If you’re a small business and you want to take that next step up, that’s when you start going to the woodworking shows.” Dan would like to see tool manufacturers bring their smaller items to the show, and he’d like to educate garage woodworkers on what a CNC can do for them, bringing both ends of the spectrum together.
For himself, Dan’s trying to maintain woodworking as his “therapeutic getaway,” even though actual vacations still involve work. On a trip to Costa Rica, Dan visited local lumber companies and “just fell in love with monkeypod and Spanish parotas and wild cashews and teaks and eucalyptus,” which he considers more sustainable than North American hardwoods. “A walnut tree grows three inches a year, where a monkeypod tree grows three to five feet a year. So there’s a big misconception that everybody thinks [if] you’re going down South to get this wood that you’re doing deforestation, when we’re actually doing the opposite.”
He uses these woods in his tables and some other items. “Over the years, I’ve found that tables are my bread and butter,” Dan says. “That’s what I like making. It’s a simple process to make a table if you have the right equipment and the space for it.”
Dan’s photos and videos are on TikTok and YouTube @the_voice_of_woodworking and on Instagram @countrytables. His website is countrytables.com.
