Since Paul and I have been married, we have not lived in a house we’ve planned on staying in very long. It makes it really hard to decorate, because a lot of times when you move, you have to adjust some of your decorations/furniture to fit the new place. Since we are currently renting we were trying not to do too much to make it easier on us when we moved. Well then I got pregnant… and then I started nesting.
When I started nesting I wanted our entire house decorated. I feel like a well decorated house is just so much more welcoming, and that’s when it starts to feel more homey and less bachelor paddish. So obviously Aubrey’s room was taken care of first, but then I focused on our guest room. I’m not sure why that took precedent, but I can only assume it’s because I spend 85% of my day in here since it doubles as my office, and it also is where we’ve been storing the last few boxes of decorations, that we just didn’t have anywhere to put. So I needed it to fall into place.
My guest room wish list consisted of:
- Matching bedspread/sheets/pillows
- Console table/bookshelf
- Headboard for the bed
- Curtains
Well now I can mark the first two off the list! This weekend, Paul and I spent some quality time together building a console table. Not your idea of quality time? We had a blast, and then started dreaming of the next things we will be building for our house! Seriously… we have a list now, and this time it isn’t just my list!
I wanted a cheap shelf/bookshelf that we could place the TV on, and that we could add some decorations to so the room itself would feel less cold and bleh. All the shelves I’d seen at stores were way more than I wanted to spend, and Craigslist had a lot of really cheap things that weren’t made out of all wood. So I scoured the Ana White website, and found this console table. Price estimate $20-50. Perfect! *Sidenote – ours ended up costing WAY more, because we are currently building up Paul’s tool collection, so unfortunately $50 was not the price… BUT it would have EASILY been $25-30 max if we did not need to buy clamps and a Kreg jig. (we could have bought the $20 kreg jig for this project – but we know we will be using the other tools in the kit in the future, so we ended up buying the whole set which made this project more costly).
Now our house has taken on a rustic/contemporary theme. So I saw this wooden table and figured with the right color stain it would be perfect for the guest room. Paul was skeptical, but he humored me. So our Friday night started out looking like this…
These 2x4s actually turned into a table within a couple of hours! We even modified the plans and added a shelf to the bottom, which I think really adds to the piece.
After it was fully built, Paul spent some time really sanding it down to make it smooth. Then we stained it. We choose a Weathered Grey stain to match the decorations in our guest room.
By Saturday afternoon, we had this thing built, sanded, stained and moved into the house! We were both so excited! We built our first piece of furniture ever, and it obviously came with a learning curve. It was the perfect beginner project. It’s definitely not perfect, but we learned from some of these mistakes so next time we will be even better. I absolutely love looking at this table knowing that Paul and I built it together, and for that reason, I’m pretty sure we’ll never be able to get rid of it. Now it has sentimental value. Which is kind of an exciting thing for the furniture in your house to have. 🙂
Living for Today 