Hi everyone, Happy Friday!!! You know what that means .... time to get your build on!  And of course, I've got more DIY insipration for you today.  Cause I love you.  But you knew that already.  

Did you notice our new coffee table in this post?

(the console plans will be coming soon)

I love this thing!  It is so simple, sturdy, and open, making the living room feel larger and airy-er.

One of my favorite parts of this coffee table is the top!

Instead of Kreg Jigging the top together, the top is bolted together!  In this post, I will show you how we did that.

First we cut a 2x4s to the length of the tabletop.  I recommend 2x4s because anything larger and it gets more difficult to drill through, and anything smaller and you are doubling your work load without really getting anything out of it.

Then we clamped all the 2x4s together and marked the placement of the bolts.

On the ends, we wanted the bolt ends with nuts to be inset in the wood (instead of protruding out and snagging people and stuff and a high possible point of injury for my kiddos).  So before we started drilling out all the holes that run through the boards, we took two boards that will be the ends,

And drilled out for the nuts and bolt ends using a Forstner bit sized for the nut.  You'll want to do this before, as afterwards, there won't be a wood center to line your drill bit up with.

All right ... with that business out of the way, we can start the hole drilling.

A buddy of ours was getting rid of a drill press so we snagged it up a little while back.  We used the drill press to drill holes in the 2x4s.  You can also use a drill.  We drilled our holes a little bigger than our all-thread (the threaded part of the bolt that you will see in a second that goes through all the 2x4s) to make it easier to line all the boards up.  This gives you more forgiveness when hand drilling your holes too.

Then we threaded all the boards on to the all-thread.  It is VERY important to use glue on joints as the bolts will hold the boards together width wise, but the glue is necessary to keep the boards flat on top and bottom.

All thread is just threaded pipe in long lengths.  It's inexpensive and available at most any home improvement store and you can get away with pretty small diameter stuff - I think this is 3/8".  

After adding the nuts to the end, we used a hack saw to cut the all-thread to length.

Then we just did some sanding on the top.

Followed by finish - this time we used Golden Oak by Varathane followed with Triple Thick Poly by Varathane.  I really love this poly on wood stain and it's so nice to not have to do multiple coats to crayon proof everything.

Then we just added a metal base that the hubs welded (he's working on some welding videos for you), and I'm the proud owner of a super cool industrial style coffee table!

We hope this post helps you build more unique and cool stuff!  Thanks so much for reading and supporting our site, we truly appreciate you!

Have an awesome weekend!

Ana + Hubs