Need: Coffee Table. Money: Zero

We're sensing a recurring theme in our lives. We need something, but we don't want to spend a single dollar on it. Why does this happen? Is it because we're cheap? Nah.. well kind of... More so, we think it's PTSD from living in NYC where we spend 5 years tossing money left and right. If you love love love seeing money disappear, move to Manhattan.

So, we're in a predicament you see. We have been living in our apartment for 2 months with no coffee table --- the drama! The solution is -- we're going to make one. Recently, we saw a George Nelson platform bench at Design Within Reach (not within reach) and Corey promised to reverse engineer it // with a little flourishing of our own.

Inspo. meet The Roberts Version.

We wanted to save money, so we went for the cheapest wood we could find. Less that $1 a piece from Home Depot. It's 1"x2" and pine.

We bought food-safe wood glue (because we'll obviously be eating at this coffee table) and some satin finish clear poly. Aaand some clamps that we said we'd return but forgot.

So, legit all in, this table top could have cost us $25.

We had Home Depot cut the wood to our needed dimensions so we only had to glue, sand, and finish! YAY easy things! (Thanks to Xander's Friend, Pineapple's Mom, Jenn for letting us sand on her patio!)

I mean, really, this was shaping up to be such a simple yet effecting project. Here she be, in all her sanded, sealed glory!

Now onto the legs. These we splurged for. $60 whole dollars! They're hairpin legs that we had made to be 13" so the total height would be around 15" When we got them a couple days later, we basically just screwed the in and voila! a table for $85 dollars (+ the clamps we forgot to return)