Wooden Geometric Mosaic Table From Old Set of Drawers

I was itching to get some furniture made and had quite a lot of old pine furniture in my workshop I needed to use up. However I'm a bit of a hardwood snob and rarely use softwood for furniture so I came up with a plan to utilise some of the wood I had lying about. I started with an old set of drawers and designed the side table to only use the wood from this drawer. The legs were a bit of a challenge as I wanted them to be longer than the longest bits of wood I had available but I'll come to that later.

Materials
Old set of drawers
Offcuts of ash for coaters
Black spray paint
Clear coat spray paint
Insert nut and bolts
Glue

Tools
Tablesaw
Mitresaw
Bandsaw
Clamps

So I had an old bedside set of drawers that I had replaced in my son's room and had been taking up room in my workshop for a few weeks so this was a prime candidate for making my new sidetable.

I started by taking it all apart in a controlled manner to keep as much useable wood as possible.

Once it was all apart I came up with a plan about which parts to use for what.

So for the main box I used the sides of the bedside table for the top and bottom and two drawer sides for the sides.

The existing drawer sides already had a small rebate in them to accommodate the drawer base so I used those as a starting point for my rebate joint. I set the table saw up to cut to the same depth as the rebate and cut the bottom off creating an instant tenon. I then shortened the tenon as it would be slightly too large for the mortice (due to the thickness of the wood) and cut a couple of shoulders to each end so the joint would be hidden.

Now I had my tenon I could cut my mortice on my router table. I set the mortice so the sides sat recessed in to the top and bottom as I wasn't comfortable with having joints in softwood so close to the edge and was concerned with something breaking. I cut mortices on both sides of the top and bottom to slightly deeper than the tenon depth and tested the cuts with a quick dry fitting.

Once I was happy I cut one of the drawer bottoms to use as my back piece and glued the box together.

Now the box was complete the very labour intensive stages started!

All my mosaic pieces were 20mm x 20mm so I looked at what wood I had available and started off with some of the old styles/cross pieces as these were already quite narrow, so I ripped quite a few to 20mm. As I had a step to the side elements of the main box I need to create a recess to the pieces that were going to go along the top and bottom. I cut that recess before cross cutting them in to the square pieces.

Once that was done I set up a simple jig on my bandsaw so I could cut the pieces to a constant width to create squares. Now the jig was set up I just needed to cut loads and loads of squares.

Now that all the pieces were cut and ready I started by randomly sanding the top face of each piece at different angles before gluing them on to the sides with impact adhesive. I only glued the pieces and stuck them down straight to the main box this gave me a bit of flexibility as there was still some movement in the pieces for a while. I had to trim the last line of squares though to line them up with the back.

In total there were 65 pieces to each side so 130 in total just to the sides!

I attacked this part in a slightly different way to the sides as it was taking ages to sand each face of each block, so ripped a load of 20mm wide strips with an angle to one side cut on the table saw. This would give me a constant block height as well which would be more useful for putting things on top of the table.

As all the blocks were the same I came up with a pattern where the piece to the right of the previous pieces was rotated 90 degrees clockwise. When starting a new row the first piece was rotated 90 degrees in relation to the pieces below it on the previous row (see photos!)

In total there were 224 pieces on the top surface.

To make the drawer I used the drawer pieces from the one of the existing drawers cut to the correct dimensions. This was advantageous as the slots for the drawer bottom were already cut so all I had to do was screw them together after gluing a piece of recycled leather to the drawer base, just to give an element of luxury.

I then installed the drawer runners and positioned the drawer in centrally in the main box.

To cover the front edging I needed to make all the pieces bespoke so the top of the top row would match the profile of the edge pieces on the top. To to this I lined a piece up with the inside and drew a line in the front piece with a pencil so it matched the profile of the piece it was adjacent to. I then used a belt sander to trim the edge of the piece to the correct shape before gluing it in to place until all the front was covered.

I did need to make some longer pieces for the corners though but made sure they were cut to the same angle as the rest of the pieces.

There were 38 pieces on the front so in total I used 392 mosaic pieces all together!

For the drawer front I thought I'd go for something a little different but still in-keeping with the rest of the mosaics. I took some lengths of the un-crosscut bits of wood and made a zig-zag pattern to the drawer front. I also adjusted the drawer runners so the peak of the zig zag was to the same level as the high points of the other mosaic pieces.

I then finished the drawer front by adding a handle made from some of the left over individual pieces with a bevel cut to the edges to help with gripping.

I determined that the size of my legs needed to be a greater length than the maximum length of wood I had left from the old bedside table. Instead of using some other longer bits of wood I stuck to my initial plan of using only bits from the bedside table and came up with the idea of building them up from several pieces stuck together....by offsetting the bottom of each part it made it look quite purposeful. To make the longest part long enough I had to extend this by adding an additional piece to make it up to the correct length.

All of the leg parts were made up of the remaining old drawers which did mean that some pieces had recesses in them but I managed to hide these in the middle of the legs!

Once I had worked out the length of all the parts I ripped them to give a cross sectional edge ratio of 2:1 and glued them all together, keeping the offset dimension the same for adjacent pieces on each leg.

Once the legs were all dry I cut a bevelled mitre on the top and bottom of the legs with both angles set at 12.5 deg.

I also cut two bit of wood that I would screw the legs to and then bolt the leg assembly to the main body using insert nuts and machine bolts.

Now it was getting to completion I decided that I wanted a black finish. I did try burning a finish on a test piece but I didn't think I could quite get the results I wanted using this method so I went with a matt black spray paint finish.

I sprayed loads of thin layers over a matter of several hours until the spray can was all empty. I then sprayed the legs and handle a different type of black spray I had left over from a previous project and finished the whole lot of with multiple coats of matt clear coat to add a protective layer to the whole table.

To give the drawer a slightly different feel I painted the drawer insert a dark blue colour.

To make the table at least a little usable I made a couple of coasters which had some of the left over mosaic pieces set to each corner to make the coasters horizontal. It's quite good fun fitting/slotting the coasters in to different areas of the table and you can place them all around the top of the table and change the orientation of them too.

It's the first black piece of furniture I've made and I think it's turned out quite well.

If you enjoyed reading this Instructable it would be great if you could vote for me in the Trash to Treasure Contest.

Cheers!!