Ikea Hack Lego Table

We are all huge Lego fans at our house (yes, even me; having kids is a great excuse to play with Legos again), but we've never had a Lego table. Lately, though, I decided we needed one, mostly because having Lego constructions spread out through the living room floor was starting to bother me. I wanted something simple and cheap, that can be easily discarded when the kids grow, but at the same that that did not clash with our other furniture. When I saw an old Ikea side table next to the trash cans at the end of our street early on a Saturday morning, I knew I had hit jackpot! It was the right size, and, most of all, it was the right price.

Someone had discarded it, though, because it looked in pretty bad shape, but the damages were all superficial, just a lot of nicks and bruises and peeling paper cover.

At first I thought about painting it, but those tables are actually made of cardboard, not wood, and I didn't know if the paint would hold. In the end, I used a dark brown self adhesive paper I already had at home (leftover from lining some shelves years ago) and covered the table legs and the sides. And then, because I had to join several pieces of adhesive paper, I added a pretty ribbon to hide the "seams". This is how it looked afterwards:

You can see the top was a bit damaged too, but I wasn't worried about that, as I was going to cover it with the Lego base plates.

Which was also a great opportunity to try out my brand new hot glue gun. I don't know how I lived for so long without one!

Here's the end result: 

I had to buy a few new base plates, because most of the ones we had were old and broken (they've been around ever since I was a kid, which just shows that Legos are durable toys), so you can see the difference in color from the new to the old plates, but the kids wanted to keep that road, and I wanted to cut expenses to a minimum. 

Because the table was larger than the four big base plates we had and I needed the scarred tabletop covered entirely, I cut a few of the older plates to fill in the blank spaces (but making sure Lego pieces would fit in perfectly between the joined plates.  

I hot glued all the pieces to the table top and let the kids have a got at it.

No complaints so far. Total cost: just the three new base plates. Everything else was free or something we already had at home. Not bad for a Saturday morning's work!

Happy Tuesday!