Build A Hands-on Coffee Table, step by step

For everyone who has been asking for the details on our new coffee table (glimpses of it have made their way into my InstaStories over the last few months – and boy did you folks notice!), I am at last writing up all the details.

How many words can someone possibly share about the hunt for and the creation of a living room coffee table that checks every one of their oddly specific boxes, you ask? Well, settle in. I shall regale you with a tale of woe and triumph and there is even a random not-sure-it-even-works alien joke worked in there for good measure. Plus I will show you exactly how to get this exact coffee table if you want to pull this same hack at your house (it is BEGINNER LEVEL Straightforward).

Let us back up for a second. You know how sometimes you dream about an item that does not exist and you are like “I like this one thing but wish it had that other top or that other wood finish.” Like you want to pull a Frankenstein combo move and merge three things together? That is exactly how my search for a living room coffee table has felt.

For ages we had a large white padded ottoman and enjoyed it. We literally kept it for like seven glorious years until it died a quite slow death by flaking and peeling everywhere (we’d find little peels of it upstairs in our bedroom – it truly got around in those final days). This is a picture from two years back:

It was ideal for small kids (no hard edges to bump into) and there was storage inside for games and blankets. A big padded ottoman is still my go-to living room pointer for any family with smaller kids, but over the last few years we have began to truly enjoy coffee tables since the kids are older. We have one at the beach house and it is strong for casually doing a puzzle or playing family games. There is simply something pleasant about having a centralized solid surface to you can rest things on and gather around.

And let me tell you, since upgrading from ottoman to coffee table in this living room, we have played SO MANY epic family games (Sequence or Ticket To Ride are near-nightly occurrences) and it is truly pleasant to use a room with a TV for way more than watching TV. Highly recommend it if your kids are old sufficient that the change would make sense for you.

But anyway, back my over-a-year-long coffee table hunt. I know. That sounds quite high maintenance. I am learning that I am, in fact, extremely needy when it comes to coffee tables. I am ok with this fact. I have been called worse ;)

You might remember that last fall we picked up a low-cost secondhand coffee table for $35, simply because the flaking ottoman NEEDED TO GO and I had been searching for a coffee table that I truly enjoyed for a while and could not find one. So I in short was like: we are being crazy by holding out for this ideal thing, when all we need is something that is low-cost and fine in the meantime – so we can get that peeling beat up ottoman that literally drops “dandruff” all over our house outta here.

You know that saying: do not let ideal be the enemy of good? We were literally living with terrible (the flakes everywhere were as maddening as inexplicably finding glitter everywhere), and for the cost of one meal at Panera we got a secondhand table that made zero mess and worked fine. We never should have waited that long. It was a large step up. It was not the ideal size or material that I hoped – but it was such a relief. No more shavings everywhere, plus it gave me a gift: the giant release of urgency to find that oddly elusive ideal coffee table.

Well, we got that “simply for now” coffee table last fall. As in, over a year ago. And ever since I have looked fairly much everywhere, but this room is sort of an odd layout, so a rectangular coffee table is simply too narrow. Even a quite large round one feels too small in the room because it does not connect the accent chairs as nicely as a larger square one does – which makes it feel like a legitimate connected conversation area. So after hours and hours of searching and scrolling… and even doing some in-person exercises, like trying a few distinct combos simply to be sure (like a round coffee table + two white leather poufs, etc) I was 100% certain I hoped a large square one. Like around 3′ wide by 3′ long. Big and solid.

Straightforward to find right? Well, to make a short story long (my specialty! Ha!), it was not. Because I also hoped it to be a similar wood tone to the side chairs and the side table that we already had in there (the darker old “placeholder” table did not tie into anything and I did not enjoy that – and I felt like metal legs would’t be as warm looking as wood ones with our old secondhand rug).

I also hoped it to have an extremely durable, water-ring-safe top so the kids could draw with markers or play spirited board games without worrying about the finish. Which led me to the following thought… “that sounds a lot like our kitchen island – which is polished quartz.”

Polished quartz is especially durable, the shiny finish consistently looks gleaming and lovely, and there is no worry about juice or wine stains like you have with marble. The kids do quite messy art projects on the kitchen island, and everything wipes right off. It has simply been wonderful for our family. But who the heck makes a giant square quartz coffee table with a wood base in the exact size that I hoped?

Nobody, that is who.

So I was like… what if I make one…? Not exactly make it from scratch, but I bet I can find a pleasant solid square wood coffee table that I enjoy (not necessarily the right wood tone, but that can be changed) and then stain it the color I want. And then what if I simply go to a stone yard and buy a low-cost remnant piece of quartz (we made our living room fireplace surround with marble remnants and it was so much easier and more affordable than I expected). And you folks… this idea that felt kinda hair-brained at first. Well, it worked like a charm.

It truly was as plain as ordering this unfinished wood coffee table (I enjoyed the shape of it and the x-details on the side of it – plus the fact that it was unfinished meant I did not have to do any stripping or sanding to get it back to a raw wood finish because it literally came that way). I ordered it on Amazon, it came within a few days, and I took it out of the box and assembled it.

After I wiped it down with a damp cloth to make sure no dust or weird dirt was on it, I stained it Provincial by Minwax (which is also what I stained our accent chairs a while back – it is a strong wood tone). I applied two coats of that in the garage, where it could air out – followed by two clear coats of Polycrylic matte sealer – make sure you get the blue labeled one that is water based because the oil based one tends to get truly yellowed over time).

Then we took a trip to the stone yard and I in short was like “TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER! AND BY LEADER I MEAN CHEAPEST REMNANT PIECES!”

To anyone who does not know about local stone yards and their remnant pieces, they are in short the excess parts of the slabs that kitchen or bathroom clients do not use (the stone yard cuts the counters for them, and some extra pieces of the original large slab are leftover). Since they are smaller pieces for smaller jobs that typically would not work for a big kitchen island or a long span of cabinets, they are traditionally marked at least half off. Our local place charges around $40 a square foot for quartz remnants, instead of the regular price which is typically around $90. For any locals wondering, we use Capitol Granite, who also made our kitchen island.

So for this large block of quartz to top the table that is around 3′ wide by 3′ long, we paid around $370 ($40 x 9 square feet). Yes, that is NOT Low-cost. I had some second thoughts about if I was being extremely irrational and overthinking this far too much. So I did what any person who is teetering between “this is too much” and “but it is exactly what I want” does, and I looked around for similar options to see if I truly was getting the best deal, or paying through the nose. This gut check can be hugely helpful and illuminating either way it ends up going. And suddenly I felt much much better, because similarly sized stone-topped tables were upwards of $800 and in many instances they were $1,000 plus!

Even the ready-made ones that I found in those higher price points did not have all the features I was looking for (ex: wood legs, the right 3′ x 3′ dimension, good reviews, a quartz top that would not stain like marble, etc). Take this $1249.00 one for example. Suddenly the cost for my own quartz remnant ($370) brought in to the cost of the base that I picked up (it was $149 thanks to the markdown they were running that day) did not sound that crazy. Especially for exactly what I hoped.

So yes, this coffee table was $519. Not the most pricey thing in our house, but certainly more than I thought I’d pay for a coffee table over a year ago when I began my search if I am being honest. I do not know what I expected, perhaps under $300? But I can tell you that it fully meets all of my hopes & dreams for a coffee table, which I have since learned is surprisingly hard to do, so I cannot even be mad about that extra $219. Especially after the realization that I’d never end up with exactly what I hoped unless I made it myself. AND DANGIT THAT IS PRICELESS. Well, not priceless, but well worth the effort.

I enjoy that it feels like something we will have forever and I truly like how it ties into the marble on the fireplace and looks strong with the kitchen counters too. Seeing the gleaming coffee table top between the shiny kitchen island and the stone fireplace surround is simply lovely. In fact our son quite enthusiastically proclaimed that he liked that the top of the coffee table is a giant coaster so they do not have to use coasters on it. I laughed SO HARD (we have stone coasters in the same color/pattern – you can see one on the end table below). The table truly is a giant coaster, so he’s onto something.

Oh and as for making a solid table even more solid, we brought in these satin brass corner brackets around the edges, because they blend in and stabilize it even more. See, when you put your feet up on a table over and over again, it can start to rock and not stay especially square, and when it starts to rock back and forth, you have to worry about it loosening and continuing to rock more and more. And in an extreme situation it could eventually collapse. These hold it square. No rocking = no getting rickety or unsteady. Such an straightforward way to add even more strength and it only took a few minutes to screw them in (we predrilled small holes so they went in smoothly).

This thing is SOLID. As in, the kids cannot move it. Not an inch. Which is kind of pleasant because they used to push the ottoman all over the place – and it would do that annoying thing to us where it slipped out from under our feet sometimes when we both had our feet up on it. This stays put. We also used a few dabs of adhesive to attach the quartz to the tabletop, simply because we worried that it might shift somehow over time. Although once we got it home we were like… this is so heavy it likely will not ever move. But it is better to be safe than sorry.

Oh and one more pointer: order the coffee table first & assemble it so you can measure the exact size of the top. Sometimes every single table varies slightly, and you want to get a remnant piece of quartz that is around 1.5″ wider and 1.5″ longer than your tabletop so it has a 3/4″ overhang on all sides, which looks truly proportional and does not read like an afterthought.

So that is it! The story of Frankenstein-ing a few things together to get exactly what I had been hoping to find. Life will not end if your coffee table does not do everything you want it to, or fit into the room as well as you’d like, or if it gets drink rings, or if you buy a $35 craigslist stand in and it stays there for a year or even ten years. But if you have a picture in your mind of something that you think would be remarkable for your family, it is pleasant to consider that you do not only have what is available at a store to choose from – you can consistently try to hack or combo-move a few things to hopefully end up with something you enjoy that’ll last a pleasant long time.

Speaking of the long haul, our $35 “placeholder” coffee table that used to be in our living room ended up being the ideal shape and size for the beach house living room! So it is happily living there now (and we have big plans to alter the top to work truly nicely in that room – more on that here).

I enjoy that our “simply for now” secondhand find has worked out to be a long term solution for another space. And the coffee table that was in the beach house living room before is living it up in our son’s room as an frequently used play table (picture it covered in Pokemon cards & blocks to his little heart’s content). In summary: the sisterhood of the traveling coffee tables is real, and I am gonna need Alexis Bledel and Blake Lively to take this to the big screen.

P.S. Want to read about other things we have built or hacked? We have a whole category of posts about furniture upgrades & building stuff.

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