DIY Lego Table

Have you seen those adorable Lego tables they have for toddlers and little ones? I love them. My kids love Legos, but when they drag them out to the middle of the floor, I just cringe. Even if they clean them up (which they rarely do) a few always gets left behind. And I ALWAYS step on those horribly painful pieces of plastic ;-) Plus, my son always complained it was hard to build because the carpet was too soft. He wanted a Lego table. And so did I...so he could keep them contained LOL

But when I started looking around, most of the tables I found were made for toddlers...or were so expensive that they were WAY out of our realm of possibility. So I decided to make one.

We bought an inexpensive coffee table from Walmart. It was $29 at the time:

And a few Lego building plates (I think I ended up using 3 and 1/2). I also found these at Walmart:

I laid them out and measured and cut the pieces until the table was covered. This was more difficult than I expected, but a sharp box cutter and a little patience finally got the job done :-) I'd seen a larger homemade table that had a field of green in the middle with the racetrack building plates along the outside, but we didn't have that big an area to work with. And the plain plates were cheaper ;-) But I did want to personalize it and add some color.

So I painted the thinner strips along the top with red spray paint and then adhered the plates to the table with my handy hot glue gun. Then I painted my son's name on the red pieces with a small paint brush and white paint. 

We still needed something to contain all the Legos though, so I bought two mesh laundry bags (Target has them for under $2) 

and stapled them to the underside of the table with a heavy-duty stapler.

My son absolutely loved it. I made this for him for Christmas last year and he still plays with it daily. My daughter has asked for one for her room also :-)

All in all, we spent about $100 to make it (those building plates are kind of pricey at about $14 a piece). But considering that the cheapest table that was large enough for my 9 year old to play on was at least twice that much (and in most cases more like 3-4 times as much) this was a wonderful way to save some money and give him the table he'd been wanting :-)