Homemade Coffee Tables

The coffee table is the centerpiece of almost any living or television room. People spend many meals at coffee tables or use them as a place to write or work on. Having a coffee table that's reliable is important and often times expensive. However, with a little ingenuity, a homemade coffee table can often times work as well as any coffee table you can buy in an expensive furniture store. Does this Spark an idea?

Wooden Cut-Out Table Top

With simple woodworking skills, a table can be built out of a flat table top of wood, four evenly cut legs and a few support pieces connecting the legs. This can be done with wood, a band saw, a measuring tape and a drill with a few screws in just about an hour or so. Now the real originality comes in when you create the tabletop out of magazine cut-outs, beer labels or cool graphically designed advertisements and glue them to the wood with a couple of thick coats of lacquer, which both protect the cut-outs and the wood of the table top from drinks and spilled food, among other hazards

Tube TV Coffee Table

Take that old big screen tube TV and transform it into a unique coffee table. Turn the television on its back so that the screen faces the ceiling. Then, build a simple wooden box around the TV about the size of the screen, with enough room on one side for a small DVD player or VCR, which you can hook up to the television itself. Next, cut a piece of glass at your local hardware store which is the size of the box that goes around the television. By hooking up the television and/or VCR/DVD player once the table has been built you can play videos or DVDs from under the coffee table, which can be seen beneath the glass and controlled with the remote. However, don't secure the glass to the coffee table itself, as you won't be able to change the VHS/DVD, not will you be able to perform any maintenance, if need be.

Speaker Coffee Table

If you have old speakers, or want to purchase some cheap small used speakers, they make the perfect legs for a coffee table, as they are think and sturdy, but also light and easy to move. Find a good wooden tabletop and four to six speakers that are all the same size (and preferably same brand, for aesthetic purposes). Connect the legs to the tabletop itself with heavy duty screws. Sand and polish the tabletop and finish it to your liking. If you want to get really fancy, build a shelf into the coffee table that can hold an amplifier that can hook into a CD player or computer, and then hook up the speakers so you can play music out of the coffee table.