Throughout the quarantine, my kids seemed to off and on dabble in building blocks. We would get my daughter a set, she would put it together in a couple hours then would go on about her life. Later, our son would start playing with the pieces as they collected everywhere. After stepping on what felt like my 800th building block, I almost lost it. With the pain in my foot still throbbing, I grabbed my clipboard and began sketching an idea for a building block table.
I had no idea if the kids would even continue playing with building blocks so I kept the build super simple and cheap- yes, I built it from scraps, mostly pine, and with screws and a little wood glue. I started with a piece of 1/2” piece of plyboard cut to about 30”x24”.
Next, I ripped some legs from a 2”x4” board to creating legs that were 1 3/8” square and 18.5” long. True to form, the 2”x4” from the big box store where pretty warped so I did attempt to square them some by running them through my planer.
To finish off the base, I used 4 more strips from my wood scraps that were 1.5” wide by 29”. Since this table was for the kids, I rounded off each leg and the bottom edges of the base of the table on the router table so that it was softer to touch.
Once the base was sturdy, I screwed the top to the base, recessing the screws. Next, I used some oak and cherry scraps to create a lip around the entire base so that building block pieces wouldn’t end up on the floor as much. These scraps were about ½” thick and were 3” wide and 30.75” long. Again, I simply screwed them into the base. *
For the finishing, I simply put a coat of primer on the whole piece then painted with a semi-gloss white. I have to say that after 6 months of this thing getting some heavy use, it would have been cool to have worked on a really creative design with drawers, etc but knowing my luck, they wouldn’t have played with it then! I love seeing my kid just sitting there for half an hour at a time just putting random pieces together, taking them apart and building something else.
* What would I do differently?
If I were building this again, I would definitely pay attention to the detail on the outer edge of this table. I wouldn’t have recessed the screws as deeply as I did since it turned out very noticeable once painted (despite filling the recess with some caulking).