Door to Table in a Saturday Afternoon

The area around the University of Cincinnati, my alma mater, is laid out more or less like a big Monopoly board. The campus is one city block, and the streets around campus are filled with run down houses that get rented out to groups of students, packed in 4 to 7 per house. Different slum lords have begun buying up as many houses as they can on each street, and on the south side of campus they've begun putting up big 'hotels' that they rent by the bed and charge three times as much as usual for.

Senior year of college I lived with five of my friends in a big, roach-infested house that we rented from a guy named Bill. Bill also owned most of the other houses on our street, which was more Oriental Ave. than it was Boardwalk, if you catch my drift. 
Even so, Bill was slowly working to fix up his properties, and one day we found two solid wood five panel doors out on the curb, demoed from the place next door. Naturally we snapped those up and moved them into our basement, where they sat for several months.

Finally, one winter Saturday after football season was over, my then-fiancee, now-wife, and I tackled this project start to finish using one of those doors. With the help of a handsaw and some 2x4's that we dragged back in my roommate's beat-up Volvo, we created an alternative to the traditional beer cap coffee table.

Work

First, we cut the door into three pieces, one for the top, one for the shelf, and another that eventually became kindling.



Second, we cut the 2x4's to the right lengths to make the main from and legs.
Next, we screwed the frame together.

I used dowels to attach the legs to frame in a joint that is both sturdy and decorative.


Scraping all the old paint of was by far the most work. I recommend wearing a dust mask and using a scraper rather than sandpaper, since many of these old doors have lead paint. The paint on the non-flat areas was impossible to scrape, so we just covered over it.

Once the doors were stripped back to their original beauty, we attached them to the frame with the eight right-angle shelf brackets and gave the whole thing several coats of Minwax Polyurethane
In the end, it turned out so well that I took it with me after graduation and my wife approved its use in our grown-up living room.

Tools 
  • A handsaw
  • A drill
  • A paint scraper
  • A palm sander

Materials
  • A solid wood door
  • Two 2x4's
  • A 3/4" dowel
  • Eight shelf brackets
  • Screws
  • Paint/varnish, etc

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