coffee table

The last couple of weeks and months have been a whirlwind of orders, endless emails, decision making and stress. We finally decided yesterday morning that we will be closing our Rugged Rooster business indefinitely.

If you’re new to our blog, we’ve built rustic furniture from scratch for three years now. We’ve been blessed to have had amazing clients and built over 1700 pieces but there has to come a time in life when you need to say no to stress. We’ve been so incredibly blessed to stay home with our kids, even if it had us working 10 – 14 hour days with the rare day off.

One of our customers asked if we would be putting up tutorials of our pieces, so you can start to build them, and the answer is YES. So I’m here today to post a  how to build a faux metal coffee table.

Since we do not have the resources to make the drawings and edited versions I’ll be sending you over to Ana White. It’s a super easy, straight forward project. The only thing I would recommend, if you would like to do a really good sand on your table top, is leave a slight 1/2″ overhang on all sides. It also makes it way easier to paint the base & stain the top.

We sanded down the top, and then took a chain to beat it up, see method here. We then took Sunbleached Oak, by Minwax and applied one light coat to the top. You want to let it sink in for about 5 minutes. Wipe off in one continuous direction until no  stain comes off when you wipe. We let our pieces sit for about 3-5 hours ( depending on the humidity in the air ) and then we apply two coats of matte polyurethane.

For the base we purchased a fine tip paint brush and a can of matte black paint. You can also spray paint the base as well, but you need to make sure you completely wrap the top before doing so. I love the look of the black paint as it goes on a bit thicker than spray paint so it looks like true metal.

You can also plane all your boards down so that it has a more seamless look, but we wanted the top to look a bit more rustic as it has a very modern base.

Head on over to AnaWhite to check out her take on this fun Faux Metal Coffee Table. We made our version before Ana came out with hers ( replicating a Restoration Hardware coffee table ), but since it’s practically the same, you do the same steps.

Ana does an amazing job, as per usual, but she uses skinny 1×3 planks instead of the thicker 2×8 planks that we use. Keep in mind when buying wood from a store, it is always less than the marked dimension. So 2×8’s are 1.5″ x 7 1/4″. So you need to keep that in mind when you are building you base.

I hope you liked this tutorial on how to make a faux metal coffee table. If you have any additional questions, pop a question below and I would love to answer. We’ve built over 30 of these coffee tables for our clients and so we can tell you what will and wont work.

Have an absolutely fantastic week!