Creating a Table DIY {Guest Post}

When I was in my college Art Design class our final project was to design something that we always wanted to design. For as long as I can remember I wanted to make my own table for my group. So I traveled to Home Depot and got the supplies.

I really didn’t know how to put this together so I will tell you what not to do from the mistakes that I made during this process. First off I know now that you do not want to stain everything before you put it together. Why? Because then the wood glue that you use to reinforce everything will not hold.  Also if you get the shelving holds like I did, then you want to make sure that not only do you reinforce it with wood glue but also with a nail gun so that they do not break off very easily.

Once you reinforce the table legs, footholds and let it set for about 8 hours then you can put the top of the table on, if you haven’t already. After you put the top on and let that dry and set for a few hours, flip the table over and stain it. You want this part done before you paint or stain the top of your table.

As you can see I did not stain the side of my table. That is because I found some iron on siding that I will put on it after I paint the top of it.

Take some white primer and paint the top of your table. After your paint dries you can put whatever design you want to on it. Especially if you are really artistic and want to show it off, for mine I chose to do something that meant a lot to me. I am a spiritual person so I decided to represent the four elements on mine and the tree of life. I am not the most artistic person but I really enjoyed putting this all together.

My finished product (minus the siding):

Pretty isn’t it? Now to put the final touches on your table, it still needs to have the siding added to it. What I found was some simple iron on plain siding. I heated my iron and adhered it to the side of my table. As I went along I trimmed up the siding so that it was even and then moved on to the next side until it was all finished. Once that was done I took a really small paint brush and stained the side of it to match the rest of my table underneath the painting.

So for not knowing what I was doing at all and with the help of my next door neighbor, when I screwed up to badly, I managed to get this entire table put together. It is time consuming but a very fun project if you ever feel so inclined to get this creative. If you would like to see more of the pictures from my original post your and view it here.

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This DIY Table post was written by Dannelle Meyers.