DIY: Reclaimed Wood Industrial Coffee Table

Right now I am sitting on the sofa, listening to Tegan and Sara, hearing my kids happily playing downstairs with a friend (it's not always this perfect!) all while getting hit with a huge Nor'Easter outside (or Snowicane, Blizzard, you get the idea).  Hopefully we whether the storm well, keep our power, and just get to be cozy indoors and go sledding tomorrow in a foot of snow (could be more!).

Getting stuck indoors in the wintertime is actually a great time to get some projects done.  While the weather may not allow you to paint or work outside, a garage with a heat lamp, or a workspace in the basement is good too (be sure to ventilate!).

((Preview))


I have been looking for a rustic industrial coffee table....the right color, the right price, the right size, the list goes on.  The more affordable tables look cheap and are not real wood, and the good ones are just too much out of our price range right now.  So, we thought, let's try and build our own.  We went to our local Home Depot for all of the materials.  We bought some lumbar and had them cut it there (we pre-measured and drew out plans prior), bought stain, a bit more polyurethane, and pipes for the base.

Most of our supplies

First thing, we needed to distress the wood planks.  We did this with a variety of methods....throwing a bag of screws and nails, scratching it with a screw head, beating it with pipes (especially the edges to really dent them) and a few others.  We even let the kids just pound the wood with their wooden tools.  Remember that aged wood has been bumped, dropped, pounded, nailed, the list goes on. So you really can't go wrong. Make sure to sand all of the edges as well.

Next up was staining the wood.   I used a piece of discard wood to test a few patches.  I purchased three different stain colors: a greywash, a medium honey and a darker walnut stain.  The darker I either watered down or did not let sit for long.  I also layered the stains, and each plank I treated different so that no two were the same.

Once they are stained and dried you can assemble and screw them together.  My husband Derek used a Kreg jig, which is a tool to diagonally screw the wood together so that it is hidden to the eye (most top end furniture uses this).

Once it is all assembled we screwed in stained and sanded side rails to hide the edges and then finished it with screwed in particle wood underneath.

For the base, we got a bunch of plumbers pipes (steel 3/4" wide)- cleaned them off and screwed them in.  The last and final step was to polyurethane a few coats on top, and a light coat on the bottom side of the pipes (the grease and grey residue never really comes off).

And there you have it! A unique and custom Reclaimed Wood Industrial Coffee Table!