I made a table!

Warning - this blog post is nerdy, and not particularly interesting. But I've spent weeks of brain power on this seemingly simple project, so I thought I'd write it all down.



We've got a spare room in our house which my girlfriend decided from an early date would be our Craft Room. The main thing you need in a craft room is lots of surface space, but we also want the room to be versatile - for example, accommodate a put-up bed from time to time. So I set about designing a table that you could stow away.

I'd tackled this engineering task before, in the camper van, and opted for a hinged table which folded download, with a fold-up leg. I thought about this for the craft room, but decided against it. The main reason is that I would need to hinge it upward instead of downward, meaning leaning on the table would put a constant strain on the hinge.

So instead, I opted for a table top that you entirely remove from its legs, and slide into a housing on the wall. The table top is a pre-made piece of pine furniture board, and the fixings on the wall are made from timber as well. When you set the table up, you lay it on the bottom fixing, and drop a couple of loose long bolts in to two holes, to hold (but not fasten) the table in place.

The trickier part of the job was finding screw-in table legs. I knew these would be hard to find, because I also looked during the campervan job. All of the table leg systems out there are for permanent fixing. I did manage to find a screw-in system from a small manufacturer called EES, but their legs were £20 each which I thought was too much.

Looking to make my own, what I really wanted to buy was a pair of these clinch nut plates, but nobody in the UK seems to sell them. Instead I made my own, using these simpler pronged tee nuts which you hammer into the underside of the table, and a pair of metal plates I had in my junk box to stop them popping out. I opted for two cheap £2 banister spindles for legs, and screwed these hanger bolts in to them (worth saying only one place I could find hanger bolts after an extensive search - thanks Woodfit).

There you go, one temporary table. We might even put a picture on the underside, so it looks nice on the wall.