Let me start by saying that our second home has been a complete 180 from our first home buying experience. We loved our first home, and it was perfect for where we were at, during that time in our lives. A lot changed in a year and a half though. We had a baby, we are down to a 1 income family, and coincidentally we are spending more of our time at home and less out traveling the world and going to events downtown.
That being said, we went from a home that was almost 100 years old, in need of a lot of TLC and updating, to a house that is 10 years old and needs very little to make it out own.
When we bought our first home we spent 2 months fixing it up, redoing the floors, painting, new carpet, adding walls...all kinds of things. This house we moved in and just started decorating. Both experiences were awesome, and both really fit that phase of life we were in at the time.
This time around, we wanted a low maintenance house that required us to do NOTHING when we moved in. And that's what we got. Now, we are choosing to do a few fun things, which we've learned that optional DIY is way more fun than the not-so-optional.
One thing we wanted was a long skinny coffee table to add to our living room. We struggled to find anything long enough and skinny enough. We looked at everything from shelves to tv stands...with no luck.
Here is our finished product of our DIY project.
We found this one and LOVED it, expect we wanted it darker (and didn't want to spend over $600). So this was our model.
It took a little bit of time (we spent maybe an hour each evening on it for 2 days, then 30 minutes the following 3 days) but overall we LOVE the finished product.
Total cost was about $100. About $35 in stain and sealant $7 in screws $30 in wood. $20 in feet for the coffee table. And the rest in little things like sand paper, drop cloth, brush for stain, gloves, etc.
We wanted this to be long and skinny, so I decided on a 12x2x12 board. We had lowes do all our cuts, which made things SUPER easy for putting it together.
The board we had cut into two pieces about 12 inches long, then the remainder were cut in half, so about 5 feet long.
12 inches was a little narrow for our coffee table design, so we bought a few pieces of 2x2x8 boards. These were then cut in 4 pieces of 12 inches long, and 4 pieces that were 5 feet long. They went on either side of the 12 inch pieces to add 2 inches on each side. The coffee table was now 16 inches wide...perfect!
By clamping the pieces together like so....
We were able to screw the pieces together. We used vintage looking screws, and didn't try to hide them. This was because we wanted an industrial look.
Then we screwed the 4 boards together in a box.
Yes....it really is that easy. We sanded it a bit, to smooth everything down.
This was the first time we had ever stained anything and we learned a lot. We picked up the darkest color we could find, and did 3 coats (mostly because we wiped the first coat off too early). I won't walk you through the staining process, but read the can, watch a video...and you can figure it out!
Then add the legs and you're done! Ta-dah!
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