Host Carol Duvall puts her engineering talents to work as she constructs inexpensive yet durable furniture out of discarded cardboard boxes from furniture and mattress stores. To make such large boxes fit and lie flat in your vehicle, she recommends slicing the corners. In a few simple steps, Carol makes a table that is four feet high, with a circular top four feet wide. She also displays a pre-made table purchased at a retail store.
Materials:
heavy corrugated cardboard cut to the following dimensions:
-4' X 4' for tabletop
-two 4' X 3 1/2' for legs
craft knife
tack
string
pencil
Steps:
Tabletop - Place a 4' x 4' sheet of heavy corrugated cardboard flat on your work table.
- Draw an X from opposite corners of the square.
- Attach a push pin to one end of a 24-inch piece of string, and a pencil to the other end (figure A).
- Using the push pin, attach the string to the center of the cardboard ("X marks the spot").
- Using the pencil attached to the other end of the string, draw a circle on the board. Remove the pin, string and pencil.
- Use your craft knife to cut the circle out of the cardboard.
Legs
- Take two pieces of cardboard that are 4 feet tall and a few inches narrower than the width of the tabletop (3-1/2 feet wide should be sufficient). These will be the legs of the table. Be sure to be precise in your measurements so that the tabletop will have a flat surface to rest upon.
- Mark the midpoint of each piece (approximately 1-1/4 feet). Using the midpoint as a guide, cut a notch down the middle of each piece. The length of each notch should equal half of the table height. On this table, that measurement would be two feet.
- Slide one leg onto the other using the notches you made in Step 2 so that the boards fit together to make an X-shape when viewed from above.
- Place the tabletop on the legs!
)
)
