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I should also mention it’s mahogany, a beautiful species of wood that deserves to be buffed up, polished and shown off. With structural bones like that, this coffee table was ideal for recycling, repurposing, rebuilding and repainting.

The idea was to clean up the mahogany drawers, give it a two-step distressed paint finish and build our own backrest and arms. I’m no fine woodworker, but these are basic techniques and within anyone’s grasp. Besides, by reusing a piece of furniture, this was an affordable makeover.

Reinvention Begins

The coffee table had been languishing for decades in a garage. The finish was worn. There were a couple of dings and dents. A family of mice made a condo out of the drawers. But there was no water damage or warping. So it was a good starting base.

The first step was to clean up the surfaces for painting. This was a relatively easy sanding job since they needed only to be residue-free and smooth. A palm sander and 120-grit paper did the trick.

Sanding the mahogany drawer fronts was a little more intensive. It took three passes with 80-, 120- and 220-grit sandpaper to remove the old varnish and prepare them for a new finish facelift.

The interior drawer bottoms were another story. Their condition ranged from “OK” to “disgusting.” Some sort of unidentified gummy-gluey-gobs were stuck on the surface — and probably had been since the Reagan administration.

Thank goodness for a cabinet scraper. It was the tool for getting into those narrow drawers to scrape out the gunk.

The last step on the drawers was dealing with those chewed-up sides. A good 1/2″ to 3/4″ was completely missing thanks to some toothy little mouse. The solution? Clean up and cut down all the drawer side profiles so they’d match.

To do that, I clamped a pair of drawers face to face and drilled two holes at their intersection for jigsaw access. I marked for the 3/4″ cut and clamped a straightedge to guide the saw’s base plate. Just a quick note about that: I can’t be trusted to cut a clean, straight line without some help. The guide was the perfect solution.

All the drawers were reshaped, with the result that each drawer side now has a shallow, U-shaped profile on its top edge. Somewhere in rodent world, a mouse is laughing at the extra work his drawer-chewing caused.

Coffee and Tea to an Almost-Settee

Of course, the most transformative part of this project was to build a back and arms.

I used 3/4″ plywood for the back panel and got some help cutting it to size. That’s because the table saw is a power tool I still find unnerving. Plus, big old honkin’ sheets of plywood are awkward. So it’s nice to have extra hands for this. Next, I measured for and cut angled corners. Here, a shop-made fence was secured to help make an accurate cut.

The angled corners were the beginning of filling out some design details on this piece. 1 x 4 pine was cut to “picture-frame” the five exposed edges of the back. To soften the hard lines and angles, I gave a little bevel to the edges using a sharp block plane. Then they were glued and pinned in place, which set the stage for the centerpiece: mahogany slats. Talk about a miser’s dream! I used 1/4″-thick lauan mahogany plywood, which only costs $12 a sheet. The slats were ripped to four-inch widths and cut to length.

The arm assemblies were constructed from 1 x 2 pine pieces (see the Drawings) and screwed together as a simple box. They got a decorative kiss with some angle-cut 1 x 4 armrests.

Painting and Staining

The seat, back and arms were already sanded to accept the two-step paint finish — a black undercoat topped by a basil green color. The green complements the mahogany’s red tones, so it’s a nice contrast for the wood. It also has a muted, neutral quality to it. That means it should be able to withstand the shifting winds of color trends over the years.

With a two-step distressed finish, you don’t have to knock yourself out painting the undercoat over the entire structure. Only hints of it will be revealed. So the base coat painting focused on areas where the natural wear patterns would be: edges and corners.

For the drawer fronts and slats, I went with a mahogany colored stain. That rich, ruddy color is also beautiful. The stain was flooded on and wiped off. The job was finished with a topcoat of spray of shellac followed by sprayed lacquer.

Staining and finishing before assembly is a good practice. You know darn well that fluctuations in humidity mean wood expands and contracts.

By coloring and finishing all the pieces, you won’t see any telltale bare-wood lines when the wood shrinks. Leave the tan line to that kid in the old Coppertone® ads.

Putting it Together

Mahogany plywood might be affordable and nice-looking, but it’s a bit flimsy. Face-nailing the slats onto the back panel wouldn’t look great, so securing the slats with glue was the only reasonable option.

I played around with the spacing — opting for a penny’s width separation or so between each one — then glued them in place with yellow glue. To get good adhesion, a 2 x 4 was laid over the top of the slats with a brick or two on top of it working as a “clamp.” Once the glue was dry, I secured the subassemblies to the base. The picture frame detailed backrest was held back 1″ so it could sit on top of the coffee table base and locate the plywood accurately. A few countersunk screws driven in from the backside of the piece definitely turned this former table into a bench.

Securing the arms provided rock-solid stability. Even though it was awkward to do, the armrest’s screws were driven in from the underside, to hide the fasteners.

Final Flourishes and an Almost-flop

That just left the final decorative touches: hardware, a comfy cushion and distressing the finish. I chose round, hammered iron knobs to echo the undercoat color.

You’d think finding fabric for a cushion would be rote, routine and dull as unbuttered
toast. But it had to be carefully chosen. I considered the design (traditional), the colors (basil green and red wood tones) and the design elements (mahogany as the star attraction). A muted paisley-patterned corduroy was the solution.

The last step was to distress the finish so hints of the black undercoat would show. The protocol called for steel wool and denatured alcohol to gently take down the topcoat. My first attempt didn’t go well. The topcoat seemed resistant to the alcohol. So I slathered on more and rubbed harder. When the topcoat finally began to dissolve, it did so without grace. Blotchy, skunky chunks of green paint came off. It even got down to bare wood.

I’ll blame it on a combination of poor technique and the wrong applicator, because when I switched to a Scotch-Brite abrasive pad, the results were much more controllable and attractive. It enabled me to get that gently distressed finish that I’d envisioned from the beginning of the project.

So at the end of the day, here’s how this coffee table transformation stacked up: It took about three days to complete. The cost of supplies and materials was under $100. And as a solution to a problem area, it’s pretty and practical. Best of all, a beautiful piece of mahogany craftsmanship was rescued, recycled and given new life. I hope it inspires you to find an old piece of furniture and use your skills to give it a second chance. It’s fun, practical and affordable. You can’t beat that!

Click Here to download a PDF of the related drawings and Materials List.

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Got Pores? Fill ‘Em

The easiest way to end up with a smooth surface is to start as flat as possible and keep it that way. Sand the raw wood very smooth and flat, then later sand out any dust nibs, brush marks, or orange peel as they come up.

That brings up the issue of large pores in open grain woods like mahogany, walnut, koa, etc. To get a flat surface, those pores must be filled. You don’t want to fill them with finish because it keeps shrinking over time, and eventually those pores will show up again and mar your otherwise smooth surface. Instead, fill the pores first with an inert material that will not shrink. Not surprisingly, it’s called pore filler.

While you can buy oilbased pore filler, I vastly prefer water-based filler. It can go directly onto raw wood, but I usually apply it after the first thin coat of finish. Either way, the application method is the same.

Most water-based fillers are sold extra thick, so mix them with water to the consistency of cream. Scrub the filler into the pores with fine ScotchBrite®, then remove the excess immediately. I squeegee off the excess with an old credit card held at right angles to the grain, and pulled in the direction of the grain. Remove as much as possible with the card; the object is to leave filler only in the pores. Let it dry overnight, then lightly sand off any residue with 320-grit paper.

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With the help of a smoke jumper, she got a couple of trees and, in those pre-Internet days “got on a Greyhound bus to Seattle, where I bought four excellent chisels and mallets, and blew my $200.”

When she got back to her wood, and looked at the size of the logs in comparison to the size of her tools, the idea of making a large-scale project took a back seat, and “I decided to get a little piece and carve my mom a Santa for Christmas instead of a big art school project.” Still, it was daunting to get the pieces of wood off the log — until her firefighting boss stopped by and let her know that she could have the use, for the winter, of a chainsaw that had been turned in to the government cache.

As she has continued her work over the years, Amber said, she learned woodcarving mostly by trial and error. “I talked to people who did carving. In Montana, that was mostly chainsaw bear people,” she said.

After graduating, through her forest firefighting gig, she met a logger with a cabin available, and a retired woodworker — named “Smoky” — who wasn’t using his shop anymore. “I had a free place to live and a free shop. That was almost two decades ago, and I’ve been making a living mostly with wood since.”

She doesn’t harvest her own logs anymore, because those she works with are too large. Instead, she has a hoist lift system in the new studio she moved intoabout a year ago and has a circular sawmill — but still finds the multiple cuts she wants easier done at the sawmill yard, where there’s more equipment and manpower.

“I still use some of those tools that are nontraditional,” Amber said, citing pneumatic die grinders and metal carving tools. “I still use the chainsaw, and I do use routers a lot to get rid of a lot of wood,” she said. “I have more chisels than I use: the six or seven main chisels I use, they’re really worn.”

She has also experimented with combining metal and wood, using chisel marks to resemble hammer patterns and make wood like metal, layering stains over wood to create a metallic look, or casting some wood carvings in bronze.

America the Beautiful, which includes the lyrics “amber waves of grain” — “I thought it was cool my name was in the song. So I made up a story that it was because my grandpa had wheat fields, that was how I got my name.” She also incorporated an image of a rattlesnake into the piece, recalling a childhood event where she and her cousins awakened a sleeping rattlesnake in a burnt-out church near her grandfather’s Nebraska farm.

“All my pieces have their own story, and a lot of the stories are superimposed from my life,” Amber said. Often, she breaks the stories down into pieces, “pare them down into a few symbols, so they’re stories for anybody to enter.”

For example, the first bed she made with carved horses came as a result of having spent time in the mountains of Montana volunteering in Native American youth camps, near where wildmustangs roam. “These are not Hollywood horses; they were covered with dirt and grime. I watched two stallions sparring one day, and where they had sweat hard, you could see the coat underneath.” The juniper which grows near her home in Montana has a very red color, and Amber combined that with mahogany to carve the horses as she’d seen them.

That piece has a Western flair to it. At first, when people identified her as a “Western artist,” Amber resented it. “I decided to do one really ‘Western’ piece” and then move beyond that style, Amber said — but that didn’t really happen. “I’ve traveled a lot, but I’m from the West. To me, Western is adventure, ‘don’t fence me in,’ break the rules. It really is a huge chunk of who I am.”

She’s still making “Western” pieces, some of which she has taken to an annual show where she would bring one big piece to sell, then book commissions for the rest of the year based on the impression of that piece. A grandfather clock that incorporates carved wolves and a buffalo bench are among those pieces.

The buffalo was carved from black walnut, one of Amber’s favorite woods to work with. “For really refined carving, I love mahogany or black walnut,” with their tight grains, she said, although she noted that her most recentcommission is with mesquite, and she’s also working on a current series of “reliquaries” sculptural pieces, which open with metal hinges like a book. As Amber carves these, she said, she’s experimenting with different logs, some of which have been burnt in forest fires and some which may retain their barks. “Each one is really an adventure,” she said.

For all of her pieces, Amber noted, “The process is less to do with me controlling, and more of a dance between the piece and I: whose leading whom when.” She keeps her focus on the carving and the overall design of the whole piece, rather than specific joinery and construction, and “hates sanding — most of my pieces are finished with chisel marks,” but Amber said, “Wood is still my main medium. I still prefer wood over anything: the smell of wood and the look of it.”

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