The Living Room Chronicles: Introduction to Step 3: New Coffee Table

Things are getting crazy around here again. It's Thursday and there is a post up! Let's just call this an introductory post. I want to prepare you for the awesomeness that is going to happen in tomorrow's post. I will just tell you that it involves a car packed full of shipping pallets at the drive-in movies about 5 years ago.

I was in the market for a new coffee table and I went looking high and low to find one. But, it turned out that finding a reasonably priced 36" x 36" wooden coffee table was impossible.

I checked out a dozen or more thrift stores in the area and went to town with Google.
The closest thing that my Google-mania produced was an Ikea coffee table that was just the right size, but only came in white or black. It is now on sale for only $99.99!

Ikea has since come out with this beauty of a coffee table for $199

Here are the rest of the coffee tables I found that inspired what I came up with and will reveal tomorrow. Or... surprise ruiner... you could just check out the after photos that I posted at the end of this post. Remember that this was before the days of a Pinterest-infested world so the inspiration pictures were pretty stinkin' hard to come by!

This is before the day that the world decided to use shipping pallets to make every single piece of furniture in the world. So, I thought I was pretty clever coming up with the idea of stacking a few pallets on top of each other to make a coffee table. I don't know how to make furniture (despite the awesome benches that my BFF Mali and I made in about 5th grade. You had to sit on them at just the right angle so they didn't collapse). So, I consulted with my Handy Man Extraordinaire. He thought I was more than a little bit crazy, but he agreed to do the job. 

I will continue this thrilling saga tomorrow!

Do you want to check out all of The Living Room Chronicles steps?

Here you go!

Step 1: Move in. Put in whatever furniture we had. Hang art.

Step 2: The Craigslist deal of a lifetime

Step 3: New coffee table (Step 3 Introduction found here)

Step 4: DIY remote control holder. A tiny, tiny step, but we are still calling it one.

Step 5: Should we change out the fireplace?

Step 6: The plant table and the plants

Step 7: Finishing touches