The last piece of furniture we wanted to complete for the nursery was a small table for next to our nursing La-Z-Boy chair. My wife saw some designs for a table on Wayfair. Wayfair even kindly provided the exact dimensions. Sorry Wayfair, but I decided to just build this table on my own out of scrap wood rather than spend the $120+. This is probably not an option many people will take so I’m pretty sure they are not concerned.
In quarantine I had already made two pieces out of the scrap wood and MDF I had in my garage. By this point I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel with my supplies. But I did some inventory and found enough wood to be able to make the upper table top out of solid pine. For the lower shelf I would have to use some plywood and work on my veneer skills for the exposed edges. The rest of the table (legs etc) I was going to paint white – similar to the picture above.
For the “walls” which is what I am calling the vertical pieces right below the upper table top, I planned to use MDF since I was going to paint it anyway. The legs though, I did not want to use MDF as I didn’t think this would be very wise, structurally. I still had one two foot length of 4×4 leftover from my coffee table re-redesign, so I ripped this length into four equal pieces on the table saw and used that for the legs.
I still had one little trick I wanted to add to this project to really increase the functionality: a drawer. More than that I wanted to the drawer to be sort of hidden – maybe so that if I really messed it up you would never even have to know it was there.
I started with the table tops. The upper one was pretty easy – I just assembled a bunch of scrap pine (thickness planed and jointed it) and glued it all together edge to edge. I then cut it out to the dimensions I wanted and then sanded the hell out of it.
Next I made the body, which incorporated the MDF walls and I attached these to the legs. The entire body of the table was held together with glue. Trying to get the angles correct was pretty difficult and required me relearning a bit of geometry. But eventually I got it close enough to glue it all together. I left the wider end open to support a space for a drawer. My plan was to have the drawer face just be the wall (see plans below). This way the drawer would be as wide and as deep as possible. I would just need to construct some parallel sides out of MDF to put drawer slides on. I would align these parallel walls to the inside of the table legs.
So I constructed the body entirely (minus the drawer) and then made the table legs. To get the notch out of the table legs I had to use a trick I learned on the internet: I cut a piece of wood at a 45 degree angle on the miter saw. I then placed this 45 degree angle piece against the miter saw fence and used this 45 degree block as my fence. This allowed me to get a very acute angle cut down the length of the leg without losing my hands on the miter saw. I drilled some well placed Kreg holes into the legs so that I could eventually secure the table top.
I then glued the body to the legs and started on the drawer. I made the drawer out of leftover plywood scraps and used the same technique I used on my Wood and Concrete Desk by routering a 1/4″ slot in the bottom of all of the drawer sides and sliding a 1/4″ piece of MDF into that slot before gluing the final side of the drawer to create the drawer base. I didn’t bother with any dovetailing on this tiny drawer and instead just used a plain old butt joint and glued it.
To make the drawer slides I just cut some strips of oak that I had leftover from a small project. I had read that hard wood is better for drawer slides. I simply glued the oak strips to the side of the MDF and to the side of the drawer. I didn’t want to bother with actual drawer slides (probably wish I had).
With the body constructed and the drawer appearing like it would function alright, I moved onto the lower shelf. Now that the dimensions were set and everything was glued together I could be assured that the lower shelf dimensions would not change. I got some 3/4″ scrap (sanded) plywood and cut it to size. My plan was to have the lower table nest within the legs slightly and hopefully I could just glue it in place which would save me the trouble of trying to find a way to screw it into place or have to learn a complicated notch joint which I probably didn’t have good enough chisels to do anyhow. I cut the plywood to size and then grabbed some really thin scrap pine I had saved for just such an occasion. I glued the thin pine to the edges of the plywood shelf applying as much even pressure along the entire length as I could. I left a little extra on the ends and then used an orbital sander to match the notches. I think it came out looking awesome, actually. Way better than I expected. I still think the shelf looks like a hunk of plywood but the edges look great!
After this I painted the legs and body white with KILZ. I left a little bit of painters tape where I had measured the lower shelf would rest. I did this so that I could still get wood-to-wood contact for the wood glue to be able to properly bond.
