DIY Coffee Table: West Elm Knock-off

Fun fact. When you start a blog after years and years of projects you have lots of backlog to get through. I don't have much in the way of progress photos for this project, heck I barely have good finished photos. But I thought this little table was worth talking about.

A couple years ago I was living in the cutest little apartment. It was heated by a gas stove that mimicked the look of a wood-burning one, mounted on an exposed brick wall, in an old building with tons of character. It was also TINY. And it only had one, equally tiny, usable closet.

I have a lot of hobbies that involve tools and equipment (crafts, baking, brewing beer, building things, rock climbing) so I have a LOT of stuff. I needed creative places to store things and I needed them EVERYWHERE. I also didn't have room for a desk and desperately needed one. Then I saw this:

It's beautiful. It's functional. It could store all my linens and blankets and I could use it for everything from working on my laptop to guiltily eating dinner in front of the TV. Unfortunately it was also crazy out of my price range at over $800 USD. Plus shipping to Canada.

Listen, everything West Elm makes is gorgeous. This coffee table is gorgeous. If you can afford it, get it. But I looked at that coffee table that I needed and could never afford and I had only one thought, "it doesn't look THAT complicated. I could probably make that."

I am not a woodworker. I had not built furniture before in my life. The most experience I had besides assembling IKEA furniture was the Home Depot for kids classes I used to do when I was 8 where we'd build a birdhouse. But I'm a pretty capable person and you know what? You're allowed to just do whatever you want! What's the worst that can happen?!

So I drafted plans for a basic box made of cheap pine that I could stain and I scoured the internet for the type of hardware I would need to lift the top without hinging it so that anything sitting on it would stay sitting on it. I found a few local options for over $100 but I eventually settled on hardware I found on Ali Express for less than $30 including shipping. (They're no longer available but this is what the listing looked like.)

When the hinges came in I built a box out of pine and installed the hinges. I wound up having to have the whole top lift because of the exact size of my hinges relative to the small size of the table I wanted to build, but you could be more true to the inspiration table if you found smaller hinges (just make sure they'll support the weight of the table-top + what's on it) or made your table larger (same rules apply).

I wound up using blocking inside to hold the box together without any screws being visible with the outside. You could avoid this and maximize your interior space more if you didn't mind screws showing, if you filled them with stainable filler, or if you used a kreg jig when assembling (I don't have one yet!). Honestly though, this was really simple and worked super well for me.

Once that was done I sanded everything perfectly smooth before staining and sealing the table! I also determined the height I wanted the finished table and ordered some hairpin legs accordingly. Had I been less picky or had more time I might have built some legs myself or scoured flea markets for a good deal but I ended up spending about $150 on a beautiful set of legs from Hairpin Legs Canada and I couldn't be happier with them.

When the legs came in the install was super quick and easy, even in my tiny apartment! Note the dirt devil acting as a shop vac.

And the table turned out fantastic, if I do say so myself!

Like my apartment? Check out the rest of my old place on Apartment Therapy's Small Cool 2016.

It's now been two years since this project, I've moved, and I still couldn't be more thrilled with it. The table stores cozy blankets which always have an awesome woody smell when I pull them out to use. I can eat or work off of the top, and I just get so many compliments on it! Also, since I built it myself, it's the perfect size and proportions for the couch.

Best part? My landlord was so impressed I'd made it that he trusted me enough to re-do my floors! But that's a future post!

Mel