I want to take you down to where the magic happens. Our janky little half garage half carport mosquito-ridden palace of rentovations! Behold!!
Step one of this project was to cut all of the table legs to the same length so we would have a nice clean straight edge to work with. Jay got to use his fun new miter saw.
Step two was to sand the edges where we popped some of the decorative curves off nice and smooth. Here's me putting the electric sander guy to work. If I look uncomfortable it's not because I don't like power tools, its because its 100 million degrees this time of year in Houston and our lovely garage is full of wasps. Now you're uncomfortable too.
We decided the path of least resistance would be to build the drawer first because it's made from all new pieces of wood and its only a box. Easy peasy.
The first thing we did was decide what we wanted the inner dimensions to be. I like the makeup dividers you can get at the Container Store so I knew my drawer needed to be at least 15 inches wide inside to fit them. To fit the bottles of cosmetic goodness we determined it must be 4 inches tall. The table top itself determined our final dimension since we are reusing the original one from the occasional table, so the drawer could be 16 inches deep. Remember this is all on the inside of the drawer, so the actual pieces of wood are a bit bigger than this to accommodate.
All we did next was cut the pieces of wood to length and width using our table saw. I would upload the picture of Jay's planning diagram but it appears to be written in hieroglyphics. I shall summarize instead.
Back: 15 in x 4 in
Sides: 16.5 in x 4 in
Front: 18 in x 5 in (this is taller so the drawer face rests on the front of the table itself)
The great thing about starting with this was that it didn't have to be pretty since it will always be hidden, so we just squared up the pieces and screwed them together.
For the bottom we picked up a nice thin wood panel at Lowes and cut it to 16.5 by 16.5. Here's a picture of Jay attaching the bottom to the sides.
The front piece is not attached yet because we want to do that after everything else is put together to make sure it will fit properly.
Hope this gives you an idea of what's been going on. I know you're not impressed, but the best is yet to come.