I’ve done a lot of searching for ideas for a new headboard and side tables and ran across this image on Better Homes and Gardens:

Let me count the ways: I loved the pedestal open bedside tables instead of something closed and solid. I loved that the headboard was rustic and wider than the bed so it served as a frame. I really loved the lights mounted on the headboard but that’s a whole other issue to be tackled later.

The table base

I did a little looking around the internet and found these at Beekman 1802:

Oh my. They even show is being used as a bedside table. Unfortunately the price for each table is $600. Only $1200 for two. Since I didn’t have access to or budget for the metal table bases I started searching for a way I could make an industrial adjustable bedside table base and found it on Ana White.

I thought about making the adjustable bar stool for the table base, but opted for the additional stability the table top would have with two supports.

The table top

I have two 36” x 24” Butcher block tops left over from the UPS massacre after I ordered from grizzly.com when making the kitchen island for my previous house.

UPS dropped the first two tops crunching corners so grizzly got pictures of the damage from me and kept sending replacements. The 3rd try they double boxed and doubled the corner protection. This box was also dropped hard enough to crunch the corners of the box, but the butcher block was undamaged. Finally. All to say I was left with 2 tops that had damaged corners. Not horrible damage, but bad enough I didn’t want them for the island in a house I was trying to sell.

By the way – I would have liked to bring the island with me but the people who bought the house loved it so much they insisted the island be part of the deal.

Constructing the bases

This is the first time for me to work with angle cuts and Ana White offered no clue about how to clamp the parts for assembly. Maybe other folks are smarter and more experienced at woodworking than I am… So I came up with a block that I used for clamping the legs. I clamped the block to the 2 x 6 table top and the leg to the block and then check to make sure they were square.

The rest of directions can be found on the link to Ana White above. The base is made of 2 x 4’s with a 2 x 6 top and 1 x 4 used for the shelf.

One suggestion – sand the pieces before assembly because they are a bugger to get to once assembled. Both sanding and painting were a pain. I think the next time I would even paint the pieces and then touch them up after assembly.

After they were painted all that remained was the hardware and tops.

Adjustable hardware

I thought the information on Ana White for the hardware required for these adjustable tables was sketchy at best and really not sufficient to know what to do. I went to the store and tested ½” flanges with ¾” threaded rod and the rod threaded in just fine. Lowes and HD both wanted over $10 per flange. Seriously??? $10 dollars for a flange. $40 for this project alone? I checked online and I could get 10 flanges for $29 off Ebay so I ended up with 10 flanges. I think I’ll add a pipe towel bar to my kitchen cart and possibly a pipe curtain rod for my sliding glass door to use the extra flanges. Or if someone needs flanges they can email be 🙂

After the flange size and threaded rod size were solved I needed to find the other parts. HD sells a pack of 4 ¾ inch washers, lock washers, and nuts for under $5. Lowes wanted $1+ for each washer and nut so I went with the pack. Ana White said you needed 8 nuts, but if you can find where the 4 extra nuts were used in the pictures you have better eyes than I do. The second set of nuts does show on the bar stool pictures.

I measured the tables and determined 18″ rods would be perfect. I bought 2 36″ sections of 3/4″ threaded rod and cut them in half with a hack saw. That was more fun than a barrel of monkeys but they don’t sell 18″  sections of rod. I read online that nuts wouldn’t go on over the cuts but that proved to be untrue. I threaded the good ends into the flange and was still able the add nuts to the bottom cut ends of all four pieces.

The table top had a little wobble so I had decided to lock them down tight by adding the nuts at the bottom of the threaded rod and snugging it up against the bottom support before I saw the second nut on the Ana White bar stool picture. I even used all the lock washers here so nothing went to waste from the HD package of nuts and washers. That always makes me happy.

Table tops

A friend cut the butcher block for me on a table saw so I had 2 roughly 18″ x 24″ tops. I put the raw cut edge facing the wall on both tables. I carefully measured and attached the flanges to the bottom of each top, screwed in the threaded rod and inserted into the bases. As I said above the tops moved a little so I added nuts and lock washers to the bottom and that firmed everything up.

The openness of the tables is just what I wanted. No matter what I do with mattresses I will be able to change the table top height of the Industrial adjustable bedside tables. The table top size is perfect. Now all I have to do is figure out what I want to do as far as lamps…