I had just moved into a new house and acquired my first piece of adult furniture – an entertainment center (fittingly) and a section sofa. The sofa is L-shaped and had a chaise on the other end. As such, a coffee table that would fit this clearly defined space was going to be difficult to find. Let alone in a style I would want, a height appropriate for eating off of and at a price I was willing to pay after I had dropped so much money on a sofa. So I searched a little and could not stomach the $1000-$1200 price tags I was seeing at Pottery Barn, etc. I came to grips with the fact that I didn’t really care about super high-quality design for this piece of furniture though I did expect it to be functional rugged – i.e., not break easily. This ruled out most cheap furniture I could find from Target or Walmart or any other store like that. And so, because I didn’t know any better, I decided to make it.
I started with some plans from Ana White (Rustic X Coffee Table) and because I wanted a rustic look I took some instructions from a user on Ana’s site for a tea and oxidized wool stain.
I of course would be modifying this design to meet my dimensional requirements. I only had a jig saw and a very crappy old Black and Decker drill. I purchased 2 x 2’s, 2 x 6’s, 2 x 4’s and 1 x 12’s from Home Depot and bought a belt sander to help with the shaping. If I knew now how painful it would be to try to build a coffee table with just a jigsaw and a belt sander I never would have started that project – luckily I was completely naive and got to work. Oh – I also enlisted the help of my girlfriend (at the time). Although it appears she is doing all the work that is only because I am the only one taking pictures ;).
I cut the 2 x 2’s and 2 x 6’s with the jigsaw which means the ends were definitely not square. We sanded all the edges by hand to remove/reduce splinters and we took turns using a low grit on the belt sander to try to remove the rounded-ness of stock. That’s painful to even imagine now, as I am writing this 7 years later. They make tools to do this sort of thing, but I of course didn’t have them while working this project – I didn’t even have a garage at this point. Around this time I also started making the two portions of the stain – black earl gray tea and a ton of steel wool left in vinegar for 5 weeks.
I also picked up a Kreg jig for all the joinery and eventually a clamp (I still use this Kreg jig to great effect in a lot of pieces). After all the pieces were cut, sanded, and prepped for joining we started assembly. There’s that drill – that thing was horrible. Batteries lasted about 5 minutes and would need to be charged after every Kreg hole I drilled. I cringe remembering that thing, now.
I reinforced the hell out of this thing. One (of many) really bad mistakes in the design that I never made again, was doing a single pocket hole on the spindles of the table. Because I didn’t use anything else to attach them to the upper and lower shelf (other than the Kreg screws) they ended up being able to rotate pretty easily. Also, it’s not perfectly clear in the images, but I spaced the 2 x 6’s out along the width of the table to fully cover the top. I didn’t think it through enough to realize that the gaps this spacing would leave behind would be a huge detriment to the functionality of the table (food got in there and was really difficult to get out). Even if I hadn’t spaced them out, the 2 x 6’s were very rounded on the sides (despite our best attempts with the belt sander) so they never would have sat flush against the others, anyhow.
I remember that the final 1 x 12 piece that went in the middle of the lower shelf was a pretty big pain to cut. I had to rip it down the length of the grain using only a jigsaw so it was nearly impossible to cut a straight line. In the end, the table fit well in the space it was meant to occupy within the sofa. Now we just had to wait 4 or so more weeks for the steel wool to oxidize.
We tested the stain on the underside (I learned this trick early) and then went to town on the rest. You start with a coat of tea and then follow it up with the oxidized steel solution. The steel solution had a strange effect where it would go on semi-transparent and then develop over time and get really dark. In actuality, it got much darker than I really wanted but I didn’t care that much.
We finished the project in January of 2015 so it took about a month and a half, but that was with trips home for Thanksgiving and holidays/new year’s. This table was my coffee table for a solid 4 years before I redesigned it. I never used this stupid rustic stain again. Minwax sells plenty of stain colors and different effects products to make this complicated process completely obsolete.
Click here to see my redesign of this coffee table!