DIY Coffee Table: The beater edition

Sometime in 2004ish, I visited RocketMan in his apartment to find a giant plank of wood: about 2 inches thick, 6 feet long, sturdy but scratched.

“What’s that?”

“I found it in the garbage room.”

“Oh. What’s it for?”

“I don’t know. It’s a good piece of wood, though.”

“OK.”

At that point, he had two chairs that he’d picked up off the street, so I knew he had a knack for street treats; this was the first in a long line of trash treats, though, and it was merely a potential treat at that. A few months later, he propped said plank of wood on four4x4s and called it a coffee table. When I say propped, I mean propped; the wood lay balanced on the four posts, and a sneeze in the wrong direction would send the whole pile careening to the floor with a not-unloud thump. But he was trying it out, you see. The wood plank was auditioning.

After much cajoling on the parts of me and his friends, he finally granted the wood plank the role, and I came home one day (this was after I’d moved in) to find he’d taken the Gordian knot approach to building: get some big-ass bolts and just drill right through the sucker. The finished product looked like this:

See the bolts? I think he just got tired of trying to decide what to do and did anything, something for which I’m very proud. Sometimes you just gotta decide to decide and deal with the consequences. In the case of the coffee table, it did us very well for several years. No, the wood was not a high-polish beauty, but she was sturdy, and she worked–and even though you see coasters in that picture, free wood from the trash room doesn’t really garner a sense of “CAREFUL!” in the owner; we try to keep her free of coffee rings, but if it happens, it happens.

Fast forward a few years, and we began to realize a few things about the coffee table: First, it was a shin-banger. For me, anyway. I tend to cut corners from time to time (read: every day, always), and the corners on this beast were brutal. Secondly, it was a beast. Like HUGE for our room. So about two years ago, he got out the table saw and took off about three inches from the right side, rounded the corners, and attached pipes as legs. For a year or so the coffee table lived as a mule, a mutant with two steel legs and two wooden, with one square side and one round. Alas, we have no photographs of that stage, so you’ll have to believe me that the mutant had her own special charm.

Finally, last year, with RocketBaby in utero and our apartment feeling smaller by the day, RocketMan finished the genetic experiment and fully transformed the beast into a beauty. (OK, a slightly more elegant beast.) Out went the last of the 4x4s; out went the last sharp corners; in came more pipes.

We're such grownups now. We have a couch! And burp cloths!

If this looks familiar, it is: he used the same method for building our bed last year.

No more sharp corners; slightly downsized; still stable as ever; and it’s light enough now that we can slide it to the side during the day to maximize play space. We have plans to  install some bins underneath to store toys. And best of all, with the Agent of Chaos roaming around, new set of teeth at the ready, we have few worries about her destroying our beautiful coffee table. Worst case scenario? We’ll have to buy the next plank of wood to make a new one.