When my wife and I moved in to our first house together, we inherited an older wooden coffee table from my parents.   The coffee table was covered with a shiny layer of varnish that I thought would look better naturally oiled.  My father is somewhat of a handyman when it comes to timber, so I assumed some of it had rubbed off on me.  After sanding straight through the veneer, exposing a nice bright patch of MDF, I realised it hadn’t.

So the coffee table inherited a permanent table cloth, and I started my plans for a new coffee table.  I had already successfully designed our bed, bedside cabinets and dressers – though my parents had these built by a furniture maker for our wedding – but I had yet to build my first piece of furniture.

Long story [snip] short [/snip], my father provided the timber (some nice 2″ thick macrocarpa for the top and frame, and 4″ for the legs), and I set to measuring, measuring, cutting, gluing and screwing.  Not too long (in my project-time terms), the end result:

For those interested in the plans (sorry, they are rather bare):