Bougie on a Budget: Marble Coffee Table Hack

A weekend project, just 3 tools, and a DIY dupe of a designer piece of furniture? This is the exact recipe for my favorite type of project. When I spotted a $1,000 coffee table online, I immediately knew I could make something similar for way less. So I gave myself a challenge to recreate the look without breaking the bank, and I personally think it turned out pretty great. You’ll have to let me know what you think!

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Tools + Materials

Tools

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Materials

1. Get Inspired

I found this West Elm Marble coffee table online and I couldn’t help think that I could totally make it myself for cheaper. I have to imagine it comes with such a high price tag because of the marble top.

Once I had my heart set on recreating this table I was on a hunt for a marble top for cheap. After an in depth search I found this marble coffee table on Facebook Marketplace for $75, such a steal!

It does sound kind of crazy to buy a coffee table to make a coffee table. But the base of this one is actually pretty trashed and it was such a bargain, there’s no way I would’ve been able to get a piece of marble cut to size for this cheap.

2. Make the Legs

I took some measurements and then made some cuts on my miter saw. If you don’t have a miter saw you could easily make these same cuts with a circular saw. These pieces are going to become our table legs.

After cutting the 1 ¼” pine pieces it was time to glue them up.

Because they were pretty chunky pieces I used this glue to glue them into one solid panel and then clamped them to dry. I repeated the same process for the second leg as well.

In total I spent $30 on the lumber so with the cost of the FB Marketplace table and the lumber we’re at a total of $105 so far. Not a bad start!

Once everything was clamped I wiped away the extra glue that squeezed out.

3. Disassemble the Marketplace Table

When I started this project I was originally looking for an actual marble slab to use for the top. I went to a couple of different places local to me and looked through their remnants, which are like cut off scraps that typically a lot of these places just either throw out or sell for cheap. Unfortunately it was a total bust. But it’s honestly amazing how many options were on Facebook Marketplace. And the fact that I found this for $75? Such a win.

Although I did save a lot of money by buying a prefab table, I’m not going to lie, taking this thing apart actually was a lot trickier and so much heavier than I thought it would be.

I ran into a bit of a snag when I realized the base was not going to be easy to separate from the marble slab. I decided to keep it intact and just make it look pretty because it was really stuck on there and I didn’t want to risk breaking the slab.

So, obviously the table we’re knocking off does not have this weird little board attached to the bottom, but it kind of ended up being a blessing because it gave me a really good surface to attach the legs to later. So, I decided to embrace it, and I repaired anything I had damaged while taking it apart by gluing it back together. Once that was all clamped I left the glue to dry overnight.

4. Sand

Like any good woodworking project, it was time to sand.

It was at this point in the project that I noticed the table had severely rounded edges.

I wanted to keep this project to a 3 tool build so while you could absolutely use a router to round over these edges, I used a sander instead.

5. Add the Stretcher

At this point, it was time to add the stretcher that goes in between the two legs. I actually happened to have a leftover piece of lumber lying around from the van. Oh, have you seen my camper van build? If not, check it out here.

Since I used lumber I had from a previous project there was no additional cost for this step.

This is where I used my drill, also known as tool number 3 to attach the stretcher to the legs.

6. Stain + Finish

It was now time to give this a coat of stain and finish. I used a fraction of what was maybe a $9 can of stain and a fraction of a $15 bottle of spray finish.

I think we should just call that $20, right? I feel like that’s being very generous. But I don’t know. Do you agree or disagree with that? Let me know in the comments.

Now I did end up applying 2 coats of finish and I kind of regret that choice because it ended up drying darker than the inspo table. But that’s the beauty of DIY right? You can make it what you want. The best part of the stain and finish I used was that they both had an hour dry time. So in just a few hours I was bringing it back into the shop and it was ready for the next step.

7. Attach the Top

I used construction adhesive to attach the legs to the top.

I applied the adhesive to the legs and the stretcher and then applied some weights to really weigh it all down while it dried. This was more than strong enough to hold it all together even considering how heavy the top was.

I don’t usually count fasteners as part of the budget, but we’re going to for this one. So it was about $7 for an entire bottle of glue, and we didn’t use the whole bottle. It was $6 for an entire tube of HD max and we didn’t use this entire tube either. And I’d say it’s about 25 cents per screw. So in total, that comes to about $14. Again, I think that’s being very generous considering we didn’t use entire bottles.

8. Customize It

So I don’t love that you can see the gross piece of melamine that I could not pry off of the bottom of the slab. But instead of just ignoring that it’s there I decided to embrace it as a feature and make it part of the design.

I took some wood filler and filled in the perimeter to make it nice and smooth.

After I sanded it I painted the perimeter in gold. It’s a very small detail but I feel like if you don’t focus on fine details then what’s the point? You know what I mean?

This was probably about $6 worth of product between the wood filler and the gold paint.

The Reveal

So, in case you need a little refresher, here is the $1,000 coffee table that was the inspiration for our dupe.

And here is my version of it. I don’t know you guys, this might be my closest dupe ever. It looks almost identical. Am I wrong?

Even better, in total it only cost me $145 to make this $1,000 table. That is a grand total savings of $854. Do you know how much we could buy with $854? We could buy a lot of stuff.

If you are new here, you might not know this, but I started DIY Huntress as a side hustle when I was a broke college kid. I basically was really good at two things, bargain hunting, which is where DIY Huntress kind of came from, and knocking off really expensive furniture that I wanted in my dorm that I couldn’t afford. So doing knock off projects like this really does feel like we’ve come full circle, and I absolutely love doing them! It has been so much fun to take some time to get in touch with my roots with these easy weekend, 3 tool, knock off projects. If you are also loving these projects, let me know in the comments below. Maybe drop some names of items that you’ve seen on the internet that you would like to see me recreate. Not going to lie, I love a good dupe challenge. Until next time friends, Happy DIYing!