Knockoffwood Coffee Table completed

In my last post I showed you an unfinished preview of the table I've been working on. I have finally completed it and can't wait to encourage you to check out the site I got the plans from, knockoffwood. A similar table is almost $400 from Pottery Barn and I made it for $25. Can't beat that.

Plans for the knockoffwood table are here.

To start with, cutting all of the pieces took me about 1/2 hour. It took me 4 hours to assemble it, so clearly I'm not very fast yet but I'm improving as I go. I went with two coats of stain and three coats of poly. The layers of finshing themselves didn't take long at all but it took me about a week just because of drying time (8 hours per layer of stain and 5 per layer of poly because it's been snowy cold here).

When cutting the pieces I labeled the end of each with the letter from the plans to make it simpler later.



I messed up a little on one of the aprons as I cracked the spacer apart even though I had predrilled. The wood is really soft (pine/fir stud grade) and the drill more powerful so the screwhead went in further than the countersink and broke it. Still, it's sturdy and I had no problem adding the second screw for the apron lower there.



A partially assembled table:



Before I attached the breadboard ends (but after assembling the rest) I cut the top boards. I placed them on top and lined them up so when I screwed the breadboard pieces down I knew they were a tight fit. Then I flipped the whole thing over to screw in the rest. I screwed the tabletop in from the bottom and went overboard on it. I figure I'll have 5 kids jumping on this table so I want it to be STURDY.



Here it is all assembled before sanding, etc.



The one thing I wish I'd done differently is that I didn't sand again after putting on the stainable wood filler. So there are two spots that aren't very pretty (not pictured because I'd be too embarrased) and I'll not make that mistake again. Ah, well.

A couple closeups of the tabletop:





This is the Pottery Barn table below for comparison.



And a small preview of my current project is below. I designed a VERY simplistic DVD storage system made from 8 1x8 boards. It will be 4' wide and just over 8' tall with the 4x4 legs I'll attach to the front of the bottom to make the base level with my baseboards. Obviously this will be attached to the wall on the back as it will be over 8' tall and only 8" deep. Also, to the side you can see more wood for the project after that, a console table to match the coffee table, also from knockoffwood (though I'll be modifying the plans slightly to add two shelves).