One of my first woodworking projects was a coffee table. The apartment I was living in was fairly sparsely furnished, since we didn’t really have money for luxuries such as bedframes and sofas. I was working full time in construction at that time but we had just undergone a long-distance move that involved leaving all our old furniture behind.
I was truly lacking in experience and practical knowledge at that point. I think my only previous project had been a tall shelf that I’d made for storage. I actually still have that shelf, somewhere in the basement. It was made from pine 1x10s that I cut with a handsaw and screwed together with deck screws. There’s no attempt at any kind of sophisticated joinery. It hasn’t fallen apart, but the shelves have sagged over the years.
I think that shelf is still in one piece because I always had it screwed to the wall. At six feet tall and four feet wide, but only just over nine inches deep, it has always been at risk for tipping over. With small kids around, that is something you just don’t want. I have almost everything screwed to the wall for that very reason.

Anyway, I wanted to make a coffee table. I really wanted it to be a coffee table. I wanted a table to put my coffee on while I sat in the living room.
As an aside, I must take a moment to talk about what I had arranged as seating in the living room. I guess this constitutes my second woodworking project, since I had to put this thing together. We had been given an old “hide-a-bed” sofa that was really in terrible condition. Someone thought they were doing us a favour. Well, that contraption was pretty disgusting and it was obvious the mattress that was stuck in it had to go. The mechanism was particularly deadly and I couldn’t stop thinking it was going to eventually chop off someone’s fingers. So, I pulled the bed component out and dumped it on the side of the road where eventually someone came and took it away to use as a bear trap or something. In its place, I made a box out of particle board.

For that, I had to get the pieces cut at the store. The guy managed to make the cuts fairly accurately, in spite of looking like he was too hungover to breathe. I brought the pieces home and screwed them together to make a box that fit exactly into the opening left in the sofa-bed. I hinged the top and thought junk could be stored in it. I then put the three cushions back and it looked pretty good.
It was easily the most uncomfortable thing in the world on which to sit.
Springs are essential to the comfort of a piece of furniture like a sofa. Particle board has pretty much nothing in common with springs.
It didn’t take long to get rid of that arrangement, but it was still in place when I wanted to make the coffee table. In fact, I still have that box. It’s now upright, in my workshop, painted white, with shelves installed, filled with junk. I just can’t get rid of anything.

So, I had some fine material I’d brought home from work and I set out to make a coffee table. The top was a piece of half-inch mdf that I cut into an elliptical or ovoid shape. I think I wanted it symmetrical but ended up elongating one end slightly. It was a bit odd looking, but that didn’t matter to me. I sanded the edges smooth and spray painted it white.
I made a very odd base for it out of 1×2 mahogany. The joinery there was rather lacking, also, since I had no idea of anything beyond just screwing things together. So, lots of screws later, I had something that looked a bit more like a fish-drying rack than a coffee-table base. It had a slatted bottom shelf that served to somewhat hold it together.
I attached the top, rather dubiously, and set it in the middle of the living room. The top was noticeably heavier than the bottom, but I thought that was ok. It was also rather narrow and almost twenty inches high. It really didn’t look very good, in spite of how impressed with myself I was.

Within a day, my kids had knocked it over at least ten times. Due to the nature of its design, there was a definite amputation risk as the top would arc down with a mighty chop as it hit the floor. And, after a few falls, it also started to slant. It was quickly becoming a dangerous piece of modern art, so, unfortunately, it had to go.
A few weeks later, someone was kind enough to give me a coffee table. I hated it.