In roughly one month, it will be a year since we closed on Harvard. I can’t believe how quickly that year flew by.

When we moved in, some things were thrown together quickly to help us get settled before our big renovation. Because of that, I was never crazy about all the aspects of the living room. For starters, I hated the green couch. That was from Jamie’s bachelor days and was in surprisingly good shape. Plus it’s like laying on a cloud. I’ve nicknamed it the green monster and we have had a love/hate relationship until a few weeks ago.

We knew that our gold end tables were a temporary solution until we got a new coffee table. So we looked, and we looked, and then, we looked some more. We loved everything way above our price range and hated all the less expensive, cookie cutter tables. Over time, I’d been slowly bringing in more of a rustic glam feel to the living room so we didn’t want the look of an ultra modern piece. One day, I came across this coffee table and thought, let’s make it! We love a good DIY! So off we went to our local demolition and salvage place. I LOVE going there. It smells so old and everything is just so cool to look at. If you follow me on Instagram, you’d have seen that we picked up these babies to use as the legs.

And so they sat in the trunk of my car and waited for us to figure out the rest of the materials. I wanted the entire piece to be made of reclaimed wood but we were having a hard time finding something that would work. One night, while Jamie was in the garage, he remembered we had these really old pieces of wood in the rafters. Bingo! We had our table top! Originally, we wanted to have a base but, the balusters were too tall and we’d already cut them down as much as we could, and the wood planks were too thick. So we moved on to plan B. But before that, I snapped a selfie. Here’s my “Uh oh, Jamie is getting frustrated face!”.

So we powered on and ended up with this! You can see that the wood cut from the center of the planks on the corner pieces are very light. We fixed that with some coffee I brewed and let sit over night. The next day I painted a few coats on and it “aged” the wood nicely. I tried one I had read online using steel wool, vinegar and coffee grinds prior to that but I didn’t like the grey tone it gave the wood.

We called my friend who owns a glass company and had a piece of glass cut for the top. Gorgeous! (I’ll post a better picture later) The whole look this table brought into the room really tied all our pieces together. So much so that I no longer loathe the green monster. In fact, I’m totally in love with it! We needed more seating so we picked up some small leather recliners for the space to complete the look. We love our DIY coffee table because we made it together and it’s a totally unique piece. High five for the Canuels! More pictures of the whole finished look coming soon!