Stokes' ProjBlog

Coffee to go May 9, 2012

My coffee table has a history, or at least its top does. When he was half my age, my father worked in a department store; there, he picked up a nice piece of plywood from an old window display. It, as a coffee table, followed him through grad school and eventually to his first professorship in the Pioneer Valley where I was born. My mother used it (with a different base) as a slide for me as a baby. I remember first eating Chinese food for the first time off of it. When I was in junior high and high school, the surface (with another base) bore witness to many Dungeons explored, Dragons slain, and liters of Mountain Dew consumed. The table (with yet another base) was the first piece of furniture in my first place after college. hen I moved to the Boston area to continue my career in the game industry, it came with me.

But now, its base is disintegrating again. My living room is narrow, so I find myself moving the table frequently — something it really wasn’t built to do, hastening its demise. The new base needed to be movable. The narrowness of the living room also limits the available storage space, so I wanted to design something that addressed both of those issues.

I built the base using mostly materials I had on hand. The main structure is made from some premium 2x4s left over from building out my workspace at Artisan’s Asylum. The legs are pieces of aluminum channel stock, material salvaged from a 1970s map/chart storage system. The casters were leftovers from some piece of IKEA flatpack or another. Most of the hardware came from my junk bin, mostly odds and ends from rack-mount server hardware. The parts I ended up buying were some washers and a section of wire shelving. The latter was mounted underneath, providing a place to put various living room detritus — remotes, game controllers, coasters, magazines, et cetera.

Not bad for about six bucks.