Board Selection

So the wood is dry now after the pressure washing and I set to picking out boards for the top and bottom shelves.  It was a bit tricky to find boards that were similar in color and texture and also didn't have such bad cracks and dings to make them unusable.  This is what I came up with.

 I think its going to look pretty good.  Some of the board have some pretty dark water stains which I'm not sure I like.  They might lighten up a bit with sanding, I'm going to need to experiment a bit with all of that.  After picking out the boards, I set to taking out the rest of the spikes that were still in the wood.  When I said mini-railway ties I wasn't kidding.
 

The downside of these spikes is the large holes they leave in the boards.  I like this from a character point of view, but as this island will be used as a place to eat, these holes might be a place for crumbs to collect and be hard to clean.  Three options here as I see it:

1.  Leave the holes and hope the crumbs fall straight through or use pipe cleaners if necessary to clean them and enjoy the character.
2.  Fill the holes with cut off spikes (George gave me a box of these).
3.  Fill the holes with epoxy (kind of a pricy option if I got for the "West" system which is apparently pretty good.)

We'll see, I think I can finish the top first and then decide if I want to go for option 2 or 3. 

Next step is milling, I'll be jointing the underside of the top boards and their edges and starting to put the legs together.