The Pine Coffee Table project

 Hi Everyone,

Whew! It's been a long day today and I'm sitting down with my feet up. In addition to the salad bowl project in the previous posting, I'm beginning another project and that is, building a small, simple coffee table for my living room.

I have a small living room and I need an equally small coffee table that isn't expensive to build and that can be moved down to the family room if needed there. I'm going to be modifying a set of plans for a dining room bench that I found on the Shanty2Chic website. I'm going to shorten the length and widen the width and that should produce a small coffee table. I'll be referencing these plans as we go.

I will begin the project by dividing it into two parts-the top, which will be a bread board type design and the framework which is composed of the legs, the cross braces, and the stretchers. I purchased 4-2"x4"x8s" and
2-2"x6"x8"s of kiln dried pine. 

The Frame

I began by cutting out the following parts from the 2x4s:

4 legs, 18" long,
2 cross braces 18" long,
2 cross braces 20" long,
2 stretchers 45" long.

Next I ran all of those parts through the table saw and ripped off 1/4" off the sides to square the sides and get ride of the rounded milled edges. It makes the resulting pieces look a little less like a 2x4.

And then I just dry fitted the pieces together just to see if everything has a chance of fitting together and I think they will:

And at that point I fizzed out.

Ok, the next step involves sanding everything and getting the pieces ready for staining.

See you soon,

VW