Last fall, Kyle, my boyfriend, was fortunate enough to move into his first house. Well, we can call his house more of a bachelor pad. For a while all he had in his living room was a couch, a giant cow painting, and a night stand to put his TV on. As excited as I was for him, I couldn't let him live like this. The first thing that was needed was more furniture for his living room. For Christmas I decided to make him a coffee table, little did I know I would end up making him side tables as well.
Once I had decided what I was going to get him for Christmas, I knew I had to run some ideas by him. (He is kind of particular if you ask me, but I love him anyways.) We both agreed that the wood crate coffee tables were a good direction to go into. The crate coffee tables not only seemed easy enough to make, but they also offered additional storage.
As I am, I knew I wanted to try and save money in the process of building this coffee table. So, I went hunting at the Nashville Flee Market to see what options I possibly had. As we all know, with the wooden crate craze, you can find wooden crates at basically any store. However, these wooden crates are $10 - $12 a piece. You need four crates to complete the project. That's $40 - $50 cost just for the wood crates. That cost doesn't even include wood stain, nails, and additional supplies needed. At the Nashville Flee Market I was super lucky to find four wooden crates that were $4 each. This is the only picture I had before I took the crates home and started sanding and staining them. Later Kyle and I decided to use wood from wood pallets to go onto the top of the coffee table. As you can see the wood that makes up the crates are very thin, so we decided to use additional wood from the pallets for support on the inside of the coffee table.
I also found two taller Sunkist Oranges crates for $15. This is what it looked like after sanded and stained.
Before I could actually put it together I had to stain all the individual pieces separately. This is what made the whole process take so very long. Since it was winter, on the days it was snowing or raining I wasn't able to go outside and stain. This is the stain that I used on all of the wood. The wood crates sucked up the stain, so this was the second can I bought. It was about $7 - $8. One thing to consider when staining is that different types of woods will absorb the stain differently. So some pieces were darker, some lighter. However, I think it adds to the character and uniqueness of the piece.
Throughout all of this we were also faced with breaking apart wood pallets and trying to get as much usable wood for the top of the coffee table as possible. Once we had the individual pieces of wood, we had to cut them to size. We wanted the top of the table to be square so we took the width of all of the wood boards combined and we cut each wood board to that length.
So now that we had all of the pieces ready, I just had to stain them all. Like I said, this process was what took the longest. Once they were all dry it was nice to see it all finally put together.
Once we had it put together first thing was to put the supports in the middle. Then we could finally screw the pieces of the top onto the coffee table. The total cost for screws was less than $5. Luckily all we had to do for the side tables were stain them.
It ended up turning out so well. I am very happy with the final product. Kyle seems to like it too. It really has transformed the whole space and made it feel like home. Now that he finally has side tables he finally has a place to put the lamps his mother got him. All of it really has made it feel like a home.
Thanks so much for reading! Please subscribe if you would like to hear more of the projects I have done and will be continuing to do!
Lots of love,
Kayla