Marble & Metal Coffee Table — But Faux and Tiny!

This is part of our Tiny House, Tiny Bloggers series, in which we turn over Plaster & Disaster to some VERY tiny bloggers to tell their own story of transforming an ugly, old (doll)house into a fresh and modern (doll)home. Follow it from the beginning here.

Disclaimer:  Inclusion on this blog is not an endorsement by Plaster & Disaster of the tiny blogger’s methods or design decisions.  Plaster & Disaster cannot be held responsible for your terrible decor choices after reading one of their tutorials.  All opinions are their own.

Tiny Bloggers back in action, still hard at work on our living room makeover! Last we shared, we had taken a break from furniture-building and were adding pops of color to the house with some oversized (for us) houseplants.

Now we’re back in the furniture game, here to share a tutorial for the coffee table we built! If you’ve ever heard Sage prattle on (and on and on) about her metal coffee table, you know Plaster & Disaster loves a good coffee table DIY. But we didn’t feel like drilling 5,000 tiny holes for the base like Sage did, so we jumped on the faux metal coffee table bandwagon by building ours out of wood and then painting it with oil rubbed bronze (ORB for the win, as always!).

For the top, we knew we’d be using a marble slab that Naomi and Sage offered us, which they had leftover from that time they pillaged an abandoned school and found a depressing room full of sports trophies with marble bases.

But like Dad always said, when life hands you lemons sad abandoned trophies, make lemonade a coffee table.

Hence the supplies were simple: one long piece wood (with a square profile), the marble remnant, and a GIANT saw. (ORB not pictured, but presumably you already have ORB on hand if you’re even remotely handy.)

(Yes our marble top had a hole in it from where the trophy used to sit, but we had a plan for covering that teeny tiny flaw.)

We started by cutting the wood to length for the frame. Somebody (cough…Sage…cough) didn’t bother thinking about measurements when they went supply shopping, and we were pretty darn close to not having enough. That tiny little piece on the bottom is all that was left after cutting four pieces to run horizontally on the long sides, four pieces to run vertically at the corners, and four pieces to run horizontally on the short sides.

Next we used glue and clamps to assemble the frame. We started with each of the ends:

And then added the bottom cross pieces:

And finally the top cross pieces:

Voila!

Then we just hit it with a few thin and even coats of ORB, and you’d never even know it’s made out of wood and glue rather than being a structurally sound metal frame fit to support a giant slab of marble!

The last step was to glue on the marble top:

And as I mentioned, we had a solution to cover that hole in the center: a tray! As you’ve no doubt learned from reading DIY blogs by now, trays are a solution to pretty much every problem you’ll ever encounter, from how to corral your jewelry, to how to corral your toiletries, to apparently how to cover a hole in your furniture.

And here it is!

We’re so thrilled with how it turned out, I can’t stop smiling.

Next up on the living room to-do list: scrape the paint off our windows, and figure out what to do with the sad empty side of the room under the bay window!