Dads by Design

Husbands. Dads. Sharing Our (Mis)Adventures in Home Renovation and Parenthood.

Category: DIY

Building a Modern DIY Coffee Table

Jason and Brian from Dads by Design smiling in front of DIY coffee table

When we decided to redo the living room a new round coffee table was a must. We’re not currently in the market to replace our sectional and a round coffee table is a much better fit than what we had previously (no corners for toddlers to whack their heads on!). Fast forward to 2020 and BAM, COVID-19! It seemed like nearly every retailer’s coffee tables were either on insane backorder and if we did find something that would arrive before winter 2020, it just wouldn’t work for our space. And that’s where the idea for a DIY coffee table began…

Once I discovered this coffee table at Wayfair, I thought, “we could probably build something for less than that list price.” Luckily, I convinced Brian to attempt DIY our table, even though we’ve never built furniture before. Full disclosure, we actually built this table twice because our first attempt was… well, terrible. As I said, we’d never built furniture before, so we were bound to make mistakes. That’s DIY, right? 😉

Here are our plans and process for the second successful DIY coffee table.

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Rainbow Book Ledges 1

Building Rainbow Book Ledges for the Nursery

Shortly after we found out that Sydney would be joining our family I saw this picture of rainbow book ledges from Pottery Barn Kids and fell in love. I knew I wanted shelves like this to be a focal point for our nursery, and they became the inspiration for the entire room. Crate & Kids (Land of Nod at the time) also sold similar ledges, but the ledges from both stores would cost us at least $150 and each shelf was only 24″. Because of the size of our wall, we knew that 36″ shelves would be best. So we decided we’d build them ourselves, and desperately hoped they wouldn’t look like a craft project.

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Improving Our Doors with Molding

After we finished painting the windows in Sydney’s room, we wanted to improve the basic slab doors. Again, rather than buying expensive new doors we thought we could DIY a solution. Just like painting the windows, adding molding, was an easy and inexpensive fix that paid big dividends.

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