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So apparently Ana White has a great book out called the Handbuilt Home. In this book there are plans for a farmhouse style console table. I know this… now. Too bad for me, I didn’t discover this until after I built this project last year. Instead, I took the plans I had used to make my farmhouse nightstand and modified them to fit what I was looking for. Fortunately, from what I can tell, her plans were very similar to how I built this table. The biggest change is I used several 1×6 planks for the table top opposed to plywood attached to a 1×3 and 1×2. So do yourself a favor and pick-up Ana’s book so that you don’t waste time modifying plans only to find out they already exist.

As far as why I built this (other than just wanting to), Liz and I had spent close to 12+ years talking about getting a tv for our bedroom. At the time LCDs weren’t as affordable as they are now, and the bedroom set-up didn’t really allow for the placement of a tube television anywhere. Fast forward to early last year, we have a new bed, new nightstand, and I think that a wall-mounted television would be perfect. The only problem is that I didn’t really check with Liz first, I just sort-of showed up with the tv in hand like, “Hey honey, look what I just got!!!” After the shock wore off and she finished shaking her head in astonishment (not the good kind), I told her I wanted to mount it on the wall. “Okay” she said, but it sounded more like “Haha, good luck with that sucker. Old home, old plaster walls, you aren’t mounting it, in fact, just take the tv back. We don’t need it”.

Me being me, I already had a wall mount that I had purchased months earlier for my office but hadn’t used. I got out my stud finder, and low and behold, it couldn’t find a single stud. In-fact, it thought the whole wall was a stud at times and at others, thought the plaster somehow stood by itself, with no studs framed behind it. It was while I was trying to find a stud that Liz walked in- did I forget to mention that I waited until she had gone to work to do this? Once again she had the look of shock on her face (of course, seeing your husband standing with one foot on a rolling swivel chair and the other half-way on her computer desk, stretching over a bookshelf trying not to spin around in circles while trying to find a stud with one hand and pushing up against the ceiling with the other to keep from rolling may do that). “Uhhhh… No” she said, “It’s not going there. There’s no way I’m letting it go there”. I tried to reason to no avail, “If we don’t put it here, where are we going to put it? There’s no room anywhere else”.

Unsuccessful in my attempt to get it mounted on the wall, I had the bright idea to put it at near the head of the bed, but the only problem was that we didn’t have anything large enough and/or strong enough to hold the tv full time. Keep in mind that the only thing I had built at this point was the box garden for my daughter and my nightstand. But it was my nightstand that turned on the light bulb in my head. I immediately jumped on Ana-White.com to look for console tables, but couldn’t find any like my nightstand. I decided I could modify the nightstand plans, as I needed this table a bit taller and wider anyway. Looking back on this now, I find great irony in the fact that I took the larger bedside table plans and modified them down to smaller scale and then took them and modified them to a larger size. Not once during either of these two builds did I actually use the plans as-is. I drew up what I needed, hit Home Depot, paying much closer attention to the lumber to ensure it was fairly straight and began building. I even picked up some extra lumber to build a surprise for Liz for putting up with my craziness. I didn’t take any pictures of my build, but did take some immediately prior to and after building the new console. If you like it and want to build it, pick up Ana’s book and hit up page 40. Yeah, that’s right, I know this now!

 

Of course, I mentioned above that I made Liz a special surprise as she had (and still has) been patient and supportive of my often times crazy, spur of the moment decisions. She had been longing for a blanket ladder from Pottery Barn for quite some time, so I found a plan that I liked from Imperfectly Polished, modified it for the size I needed, picked up a few extra 1x6s and some dowel rods and went to work. She was quite happy!