DIY Rustic X Console & Coffee Tables!

Hi!

I recently decided to tackle building some tables for our home, including a coffee table and a console table. My new hubby (reluctantly) agreed to help after I begged. I found a table I liked from, of course, Ana White's website. If you aren't familiar with it, she is crazy AWESOME, and you can find plans to build anything on there! HERE are the original plans for the console and HERE are the plans for the coffee table. We modified both so the tables would be perfect for the spaces we had in mind for them. (Of course, I had to be difficult..) We wanted a shorter in length/taller in height console table and a more square/less rectangular coffee table. The console took us about a day. The X's on the sides were the most time consuming part since we changed the dimensions of the table, the angle of the X's had to be changed.. who knew?! My husband, the engineer, did. He, who is completely left-brained, busted out the calculator and started figuring out the cosine or tangent or some crap for the angle. And I, right-brained, criss-crossed the boards in the space and marked where to cut with a pencil.. (and it worked). We also decided to do a slatted bottom, instead of one board, which, of course, made it a little more difficult, but worth it :) After tackling that table, the coffee table was a breeze and took about 4 hours to build. I used Rustoleum Weathered Gray stain on them first and then Rustoleum Dark Walnut stain on top of that. I felt that having the gray underneath it warmed up the dark brown color a bit! The console cost us about $60 total and the coffee table about $35!! Hell yea.  Here are our results: