DIY Restoration Hardware Surfboard Coffee Table
I’m so excited to share our new surfboard coffee table with you! I’ve been talking about building one of these for a long time and Glen said I had to sell my current coffee table prior to building the surfboard coffee table as we had planned to build it out of oak and that would be a pretty penny.
First off, we decided to use oak wood as it’s a very hard wood so it’ll be more durable. Second, since we wanted to replicate the original from Restoration Hardware ( which is made out of oak ) we went with red oak from our local hardware store.
Here’s the link to the RH surfboard coffee table.
For the legs we went with 2″ dowels for the vertical legs and 1.25″ dowels for the horizontal legs and again, in oak.
For me, I really wanted to get this as close as I could to the original coffee table so the legs alone cost us 91.83 Canadian. Keep in mind, things are a llllot more expensive in Canada due to inflation and exchange rate.
Since this is a more difficult build, I wont be giving you a tutorial as that would take forever, but I did photograph the process and will have a Tiktok live as well.
For those of you who are more skilled builders, I have saved all our receipts and the cost of the wood was 216.83. This price doesn’t include stain, random tools and part we had to purchase to complete the job.
But honestly, totally worth it this coffee table was almost 2,000 after the exchange rate and shipping.
The Process
We made the base first and we used screws and wood glue. We let it dry for 24 hours. While drying we started on the top and we build it separately from the bottom. We used a biscuit joiner to connect all the 1×3 boards together. We also used wood glue. We left this as well for 24 hours to dry so it was completely solid when we went to attach the top to the bottom.
For the surfboard top, we took a piece of cardboard and sketched out our design onto it so we could transfer it onto the top. I was most nervous for this part as I haven’t had success in the past.
But It ended up working out perfectly. We drew the first side and then cut that out and traced it out on the other three sides.
We then took our cardboard stencil and traced out the top on the wood.
Here’s how our Restoration Hardware surfboard coffee table turned out
I guess I wasn’t taking the picture of the coffee table straight on as the horizontal dowels are perfectly centered and they show they aren’t.
I also haven’t stained it yet as the wood in real life is so beautiful and I’m scared to wreck it. Eventually I would like to stain it something similar to our side table as seen on the far right.
I’m beyond happy with how it turned out. It looks identical – but it’s slightly lighter since all our town had was red oak and they used white oak.
I love how the oak has natural grain, distressing and you can see where a few of the biscuits are from where we joined the boards. It doesn’t look like a DIY’d coffee table, that’s for sure.
I will be staining it a very light Beachwood, but I’m going to do a trial and error on some scrap pieces of wood as I don’t want it to be dark ( I want it to look aged )
For some reason, my editing makes the wood look a lot more red than it is. The coloring is so creamy and sandy in real life. I love it as is but I also want to try and get it as close to the restoration hardware coffee table as possible.
I would love to hear what you think about our Restoration Hardware Surfboard Coffee Table!
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