Walnut Side Tables
After our quest for a matching pair of midcentury-ish side tables, that were the right height for our couch and that ALSO had drawers, came up with nothing after a few months of searching online, I decided to give designing some myself a shot. Inspired by a teak 'surfboard' style coffee table that we had recently purchased, I started by designing a first draft of the table in Fusion 360. Since my intention was to build these in walnut, and walnut is not the cheapest wood, I opted to make a test table from cheap pine and plywood that I had already. After starting that table, I realized that my design had some odd angles that made measuring accurately quite difficult and that I also needed to account for some straight edges at the tops of the legs in order to get things to join cleanly.
With a few revisions and tweaks to make it a bit easier to build, I started with the walnut and built what you see here. There were a few tweaks along the way and a bit of a drawer redesign in order to allow for solid wood drawer bottoms (didn't want to go buy 1/4" walnut plywood during a pandemic) and to change to wooden drawer slides and stops (because I decided I didn't want metal on the sides of the drawers when they came out). I've added a few less-fancy images at the bottom for those curious about the drawer construction and mechanics.
For those interested in giving this build a try, click here to download a pdf of the plans that I worked from, the templates that I used and some photos of the jigs that I made to make it all easier.