Dads by Design

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

Tag: 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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Sydney Nursery Reveal 2

Sydney’s Nursery Reveal

Shortly after Sydney‘s birth mom chose us, we began thinking about how her nursery. By happenstance, a few weeks later, a Pottery Barn Kids catalog showed up in the mail with a photo of rainbow bookshelves that became the inspiration for Sydney’s room. Like her name, Sydney’s room is packed with meaning, and every choice was intentional. It was so important for us to create a space for her that felt unique and welcomed her as a member of our family.

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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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Painting Our Windows Black

As we were prepping for Sydney’s arrival, and putting together her nursery, the first thing we knew that we had to do was get rid of the terrible shutters in her room. Not only were the window casings in bad shape (all the windows on our first floor are like this), but the shutters wouldn’t provide the necessary blackout lighting we’d want in a nursery or a kids room.

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Refinishing and Reupholstering the Dining Table

After a months-long break, we’re back. We’ve done a few things since our last post: we removed the world’s strongest clotheslines from our backyard, did some major spring cleaning in our backyard, and (somewhat) planned the entire future layout of our house. In between, we trained and ran our first marathon, so no blog posts for you, our few devoted readers. 😉 Now that our days of endless running are over (for now), we decided to refinish and reupholster our dining room table.

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