Now that I’d been working with wood for a couple years and knew a few more tricks, my tolerance for some of the poor quality of my earlier pieces was really starting to get to me. I use my coffee table ALL the time so this one was really bothering me: the stain that I had used was ugly, the rungs on the sides rotated, and the gaps on the top of the table drove me nuts. I was determined to improve all of these aspects…
I really liked the farmhouse look with a white base and a stained wood top:
But I needed the dimensions to remain mostly the same as the first iteration. Also I didn’t love the fact that the cross braces (on this farmhouse model) prevented your legs or feet from being able to access the bottom of the table as my wife and I often sat on adjacent sides of the table and used the lower shelf as a foot rest. So we came up with a slightly alternate design in the same style.
Important improvements were the ability for the table to be accessed from all sides without restriction. There was an overhang on all sides so you could slide it right up to you if you were eating at the couch. I also planned to try to have the 2 x 6’s on the top be as close together as possible (given my tool limitation at that time). I started with dismantling the old table and sanding down as many pieces for reuse as I could. I cut all of the lower pieces and we spray painted them with Rust-oleum Satin white paint. This really helped avoid brush strokes on the furniture (which I really don’t like the look of).
Dismantling the old table 
Painting the lower parts of the new table
For the table top we researched a technique to make pine look more “exotic” (read: not as cheap). The technique used a butane blow torch to slightly burn the wood and make the grain “pop”. We were really impressed with the results of this process and continued to use it often after this. One thing to consider when doing this: each different cut of wood burns a little differently. The 2 x 6’s did not burn identically to the 1 x 12’s I used on the lower shelf. This could be something about the milling or something about the tree used for each piece of wood (when you buy “white wood” from big box stores it can apparently be several different varieties of trees – either pine or something similar). Similarly, plywood will not burn like solid wood like this. For the table top though, burning the 2 x 6’s produced a really pretty rich color.
Next, I constructed the base – mostly with Kreg jig’ed joints. I tried to hide as many of these Kreg holes as I could (another improvement over the first iteration). You can see in the pictures below I hid a lot of them on the top of the cross beams as these would be completely covered by the lower and upper table surfaces. The holes I had a really hard time concealing were the ones on the 4 x 4 posts that I was using to secure the table top to the posts and also the holes I had to make in the 45 degree braces to hold them to the posts and cross beams. We tried to fill in as many holes and imperfections as we could with wood putty and then sanded it smooth (that’s the discoloration you see on a lot of the white paint of the base).
I constructed the table top by taking all of the burnt 2 x 6’s and placing them as close together as possible and then Kreg-ing them to one another on the underside. It was a lot of Kreg holes and produced a not-so-level end product. But it was too late – I couldn’t sand it down to make the surface more level as this would remove the burnt effect and it wasn’t easy to spot treat with this technique as it would be obvious where this took place.
When it came time to attach the upper surface to the posts/legs my biggest error of this project presented itself:
I bought new 4 x 4’s for the corner posts of the table – the old table just had 2 x 4’s on the corners. I was mostly shopping at Home Depot at this time as it was closer than the nearest Lowe’s and I figured the two stores were identical apart from their exclusive brands. Well, at home depot the only white wood 4 x 4’s I can get are not kiln dried and they in fact come quite wet (FYI [at my Lowe’s at least] they stock kiln dried 4 x 4’s). I smartly tried to dry out the wet Home Depot 4 x 4’s before painting them as I didn’t want to lock that moisture inside them (for it just to come out later and split the wood). I dried them for what must have been 2-3 weeks on our balcony in direct sunlight. By the end they felt and seemed pretty dry. Fast forward – I spray painted them and constructed the table base using them and drilled my Kreg holes in them. These Kreg holes would go up through the top of the 4 x 4’s to bite into the table top (that I had just finished) so that the two were held together well. I had a Kreg guide to tell me which size screw to use and what size hole and how to set the bit. I tested out the hole size on some scrap wood as it would be pretty bad if the screw went all the way through to the table top surface. All seemed good.
I put the table top on the garage floor (upside down) on top of a tarp and then centered the constructed white base on top of it. I screwed in two (opposite) posts with 2 screws each and then turned it over to make it hadn’t gone through. !!It went through on all four!! seemingly ruining the table top. I was devastated. How had I messed up this measurement?? It turned out the 4 x 4’s were so wet that the Kreg screws went into the 4 x 4’s pocket hole, bit into the dry 2 x 6’s of the table top and then plowed right through the remaining 4 x 4 material without stopping at the bottom of the pocket hole. I had no idea how to fix this. I took a couple days and tried to let the 4 x 4’s dry further.
In the end I couldn’t do much about it, I carefully screwed these screws in making sure not to go too far. I filled in the screw holes from this debacle with a dark wood putty and reinforced the table top by driving wood screws through the white crossbeams into the table top. We finished the table by applying several layers of Minwax Polycyrlic and very lightly sanding it down so it was smooth to the touch. Final sanding was done with steel wool to make it really smooth.
I completed the lower shelf by ripping the 1 x 12’s with a circular saw. This gave a better result that the jig saw I used last time, for sure.
No one else could see the holes that I accidentally created but I could. Eventually this table slowly drove me crazy with all its errors. The 4 x 4’s did end up splitting pretty badly because of additional locked in moisture. The 2 x 6 table top had gaps between the planks. These gaps weren’t huge and didn’t impede the functionality of the table so much but food would stuck in there very badly and was impossible to get back out – even with a vacuum cleaner. Also the 1 x 12’s on the lower shelf weren’t perfectly aligned.
A few years later I would have another go at this table, and I think I finally got it right!