Knock-Off Wood - Attempt #1

A few weeks ago I mentioned wanting to attempt some of the designs on found on the fabulous Knock-Off Wood website. We followed her design for Pottery Barn's Hyde Park easy console table.

Fortunately for us, our good buddy Parker works at Home Depot in the lumber department. We headed over there for him to help us pick out and cut down our wood.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find some of the sizes listed on Ana's plan, so we had to improvise a bit. We thought we did fine, but ultimately it didn't work. We couldn't find 1x3s, so we swapped them out for 1x4s. We chose to go with the cheapest pine, this being our first time and the likelihood that we'd mess up. I was expecting it to be pretty cheap, but with the brushes and varnish and stuff it came out to a total of $70 (about what we paid for our beautiful Crate and Barrel bookcase on the same day!)

We set up shop on our porch and set to work. It didn't take very long - maybe three hours.

We put one coat of stain on Saturday (when we built it), one on Sunday evening, and I put on a third on Monday while Hans was at work.

The finished product looks pretty well as long as you don't look too close. We couldn't get the putty to stick to hide the nails, so you can see them. We also had a problem with wood glue oozing out between boards. We thought this would be fine because it dried pretty clear, but the problem came when the wood stain wouldn't stick to it. The whole stain job looks pretty splotchy. I imagine it'd look a lot better if we'd painted it a solid black or white. But our room is all this dark wood color, so that's what we had to go with.

Like I mentioned earlier, we didn't have the right size wood for some pieces and that ended up causing our top piece to be smaller than the rest of the table. We opted to make all boards flush on the front, the part you'd see, and the back has all the mess ups.

It works for now. I was really disappointed because I thought it'd be a lot easier and look a lot nicer. But for our first attempt, maybe not bad. I'd be willing to try another design now that we've got on under our belt. And this console table looks infinitely better than the ancient, ugly piece we had before!