The sunroom at Janet Fletcher and Ed Graca’s cottage is a great place to enjoy a morning coffee and take in views of the lake, save for one thing—it needed a coffee table, one that would fit the small space and suit their 70-year-old Lake Muskoka cottage. “We don’t have a big, fancy place that you’re going to get a $900 coffee table for,” says Janet. It worked out well, then, that they had a broken, folding Muskoka chair lying around. “We didn’t know what to do with it,” says Ed, “but I thought I could use the back of the chair for the top of a table.” To test his theory, Ed disassembled the old chair and started playing around with the pieces. He converted four arm supports into table legs, which he secured using the metal pins that allowed the chair to fold down, and stabilized the legs with support pieces from the back and the seat. The chair arms became a shelf, and the chair back became the coffee table top, secured with wood glue and screws. Finally, Ed sealed it with a couple coats of polyurethane. “I tried to keep it as natural as possible,” he says.
It’s the work of a true cottage putterer. “I didn’t use a plan at all,” says Ed. “But I was able to put it together and make it look nice.”
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