Making Making Making

A friend needed a new coffee table, their current one is too big for the space. I needed to find a project for the plywood from an old shipping pallet (a hard rubbish find) and a wooden chopping board discarded from the kitchen. The solution?

Use the ply and laminated timber chopping board to create a 2-tier, rustic school desk "conversion!" The ply, as you'd expect from life as the top of a shipping pallet, looks, well, lived in. Likewise the chopping board. The ply also tends a bit ruddy when clear coated, I've used this type of pallet before. So I've mixed a tiny bit of green acrylic art paint with the sanding sealer to create a mid brown hue.

Some of the green kind of globbed around the screw heads, countersunk 2mm below the surface but, a bit of elbow grease with sandpaper and PVA plus sanding dust filler, the green is a tinge like a copper screw corrosion stain. That really speaks "old" eloquently. By the time I finish the sanding and lacquering, this thing is going to scream "stylishly weathered!"

The chopping board is laminated planks, an offcut from a kitchen benchtop, an "inch" thick so, cut in half, it's made the sides. The ply pieces are screwed through, into the chopping board uprights. A hard rubbish, Indonesion mahogany bed slat has provide a back stop on the rear edge of both the ledge and the top and also provide lateral rigidity. This stuff was so hard, my 500w cordless drill struggled to predrill the 3mm pilot holes for the wood screws!

The final touch to give the "conversion" some "authenticity" is a set of casters, 75mm height above floor, 2 locking, 2 free. Imagine a school shelf desk, it's formica top long peeled, the metal legs too rusty to salvage. Imagine the open-backed, wooden box gets a loving sanding and fill, a varnish and a set of wheels. Now imagine it in front of an Ikea styling of a mid-century modern, wooden armed sofa, as a coffee table.

Photos will be added when the job's finished.