We picked out living room furniture for our new house a few weeks ago. We have the usual couch, love seat and recliner setup. Our living room is wider than deep so we want the love seat and recliner to be at 45 angles from the couch so that each of them are facing towards the tv. We want two end tables to go in between the three pieces, but square ones won’t really work out because no matter how you turn them, one of the seats have a corner of the table pointing at them. We didn’t really want a round table either, so we decided to go with an octagon.
Octagon tables are pretty hard to find, and it wasn’t looking likely that we’d be able to find one that matched anything else in the house so I decided to try to make them. I’ve never attempted anything like this before so I was pretty nervous. I drew it up first on Google Sketchup to figure out the sizes for everything and went to buy the wood. I had originally planned on just cutting everything with a handsaw and miter box, but very quickly realized that wasn’t going to be practical.
Fortunately, my dad has a table saw that can do the angled cuts so I went over there to cut all the pieces. Actually, he ended up cutting most of them for me. The assembly wasn’t too bad other than trying to figure out how to get it to stay together long enough to get enough pieces assembled for it to support itself.
The tile and stain match the floor and cabinets in our new house and were a bit of hassle to track down. I borrowed a wet saw from my step-father to cut the tile. This was my second time tiling, I put down tile in the master bath of our current house shortly after moving in. It was much easier than I remembered this time.
Thankfully all the trim pieces fit together nicely around the tile in the end. The only part I’m not real happy about is the stain. I had a hard time getting it consistent across the whole table, but all in all, not too bad for an amateur. I’m going to finish up the second table and if I’m not too burned out afterward, work up a design for a coffee table.
Edit: Crud, just realized we changed our tile selection in the house and I used the original tile on the tables. Oh well, they’re pretty close to each other.