MORE Homemade Furniture

So after building our own dining room table out of necessity (and curiosity as to whether or not we could do it), Alex and I are pretty into furniture building. Having a copy of Ana White’s Handbuilt Home doesn’t hurt, either, since we can easily flip through the book and say … “yeah, this looks good. Let’s build this.”

Next on our agenda was filling an annoyingly wasted space in the kitchen — a little nook across from the basement door that is about 15 inches deep. Since we’ve moved in, we’ve looked at that spot thinking “It would be great to have more storage over there — a table, shelves, anything”, but we couldn’t find something to fit in the spot.

So, here’s me stating the obvious:  the best part about building your own furniture is that you can make it whatever dimensions you want!

I was out of town for the weekend, and Alex decided to use one of Ana White’s plans to make a console table to fit in that corner.   Since the professional photographer of the house was away, the best Alex could do was…use his cell phone.  On the plus side, the camera is pretty decent!  On the minus side, it’s not the real camera!

The wood for the console post-cut and pre-assemble. Hard to believe this pile of wood will become a table!

The skeleton has come together!

This is to prove that I am lightning-fast at staining! Just a blur of motion. 

Here is the table in a partially-complete state, with the top stained and unfinished drawers:

And here is the final result:

I love the Greek-blue color, which we picked to match the fabric for a faux-Roman Shade that I’ll eventually get around to making.

The best part is that now we have a place for our coffee maker, cutting boards, and toaster oven, freeing up precious counter space. As you can see in the photo, the drawers aren’t flush with the front of the console — this isn’t a problem with the design, but with the available supplies. We couldn’t find a 12″ drawer slide at Lowe’s or Home Depot — the smallest was 14″. So we went with the too-long version for now, which makes the drawer faces stick out. Eventually we’ll order the correct 12″ versions online … just add that to our very long “we’ll get around to this” list.