DIY Chunky Distressed Coffee Table

You gotta love Pinterest.  Recently, while perusing around Pinterest land, looking for coffee table inspiration, I came across this guy.

 

It’s made from old pallets.  And you know me and my love for furniture made out of pallets.  I drool.  The great thing about Pinterest is that when you click on any pinned item you get a pop up window with the item’s original link.  So, I followed the link on over to InspireMeHeather. 

The inspiration for her pallet coffee table was this coffee table in Western Living.

Upon seeing these pictures, I fell in love.  So much so, that I persuaded Tim to sit down with me Friday night and draw up plans for our very own pallet inspired chunky distressed coffee table.  We stayed up late hammering out the details, dimensions, and board sizes.  We work well together.  I tell him what I want and he makes it happen.  By Saturday morning, I had already changed my mind about some of the details.  I’m a girl.  It happens.  Tim rolls with it nicely.

We spent all of Saturday morning chasing our exasperated kids through Home Depot while simultaneously trying to make big decisions on which bolts and boards to use to build our coffee table.

 

And the rest of the weekend was spent measuring, cutting, hammering, drilling (Tim) and staining, painting, and sanding (me).  I’m not sure what our kids did that whole time, but thankfully they all survived.

 

I was going to take step by step pictures for you guys, but when I went to get my camera so I could document everything, the battery was dead.  I apologize, but I couldn’t put a hold on our project to wait for the camera battery to charge up – we were on limited time constraints.  If you want to build your own coffee table, InspireMeHeather has some great instructions on her blog that would be helpful (although we built ours a little bit different).

The great thing is that it only cost about a $90.  That and a weekend full of blood, sweat, and tears (ok, not really).  Well, kind of.  I’m pretty sure Tim sweated (although I did not) and Peyton fell down once and there was both blood and tears.  She’s okay though.

But, we now have a new coffee table that we absolutely love.

 

We love the big chunky legs, the distressed look, the oversized bolts, the cracks and imperfections in the wood (which not only add character, but also hides all our mistakes), and the combination of painted wood on the bottom with the stained boards on top.

 

While we were building it, I did debate painting the top boards a mix of mismatched, but similar colors like in the inspiration coffee table in the photo, but in the end, we loved the look of the stained wood so much, that we decided to keep it this way.  At least for now.  I can always change my mind later and go back and paint them. 

 

(If you’re curious, we used 6x6 boards for the chunky legs, which Tim cut to about 14 inches each.  The sides around the coffee table are 2x6 boards.  Tim notched into the 6x6s to get the 2x6s to lay flush into them.  And the top is 5- 1x8 boards with 2- 1x6 boards mixed in.  If I remember correctly, the whole things measures about 43in x 32in. )