Welcome to Week 6 of the One Room Challenge!
If you’re new here, check out our progress from the previous weeks as we make over our living room into a modern moody vintage dream.
Weeks 1 & 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5
So far we’ve everything has been about transforming the walls: paint, diy paintings, and a diy accent slat wall. This week, it was time to focus on the center of the living room: the coffee table!
I’ve never built furniture before, but I’d never made an accent wall or stretched my own canvas before either, so here’s to figuring it out as we go!
Trash to Treasure
I got the idea to build this table from the bathroom, of all places. We just swapped out our tiled bathroom counters for quartz slabs, and as our counter guys were wrapping up they asked if we wanted to keep this leftover piece. Otherwise it was headed for the garbage.
Instinctively, I said I’d keep it. Even though I had no idea what I was going to do with it.
Then, when I realized we needed a coffee table for the living room it became so clear what to do with this piece of quartz: turn it into a coffee table!
Since I’ve never built a table before, somehow the idea that the quartz slab already gets us 80% of the way to a table, it seemed like a super do-able project. It’s not so much building a table as it is building something to hold up this leftover counter piece.
DIY Coffee Table Structure
As I was designing this table, I realized it would end up being really similar to a bed frame: a bed frame has slats that prop the mattress up. Same thing here, except for instead of a nice fluffy mattress, we have a hard, heavy, smooth slab of quartz.
Creating the frame was actually fairly easy. Except I didn’t realize until midway through building it that the slab’s edges weren’t straight. Since it was a leftover piece, they didn’t bother to cut it with nice 90degree corners. So, had to try to fit the frame to the irregular-shaped slab.
DIY Coffee Table Pipe Legs
Since the table would be mainly quartz, the place where we could really inject some character to fit our moody modern vintage, a touch gaudy vibe is the legs.
So we went for these pipe legs in an X arrangement that we colored gold and copper. The use of pipe is very industrial, but I think the gold color makes it touch gaudy.
Also this week: we bought a new rug and new curtains, which you can see in the photo, too!
Stay Tuned for Next Week
That’s we’ve been up to this week! Next week we’re back to the walls. I have an idea for how to dress up that big blank wall behind the TV:
All the ORC Updates
Check out all the other ORC participants’ updates this week at the link below:
http://www.oneroomchallenge.com/orc-blog
2 Comments
That coffee table is stunning! How did you make the base? Where did you get the pipe? How did you color it? Please tell me there’s a tutorial on the way?
Thank you so much! For the pipe base, you can either buy the pipe pieces separately from Home Depot or a similar store and design the pattern yourself or you can purchase a pipe legs kit in various patterns. To add the gold color, I spray-painted paint+primer, applied Rub n Buff, then finished with a clear protective spray coat. For more details, there is a tutorial on the way in the next couple of weeks! Until then, you can also check out some of the process in my Instagram highlights.