Here's a simpler project my son and I got to do today. It started yesterday actually, when my wife suggested we get a table for him to use on the patio for drawing and painting. So the boy and I drove to Ikea, where we picked out a table and then did that long horrible walk they make you do through the entire store -- but used it to talk about what the art table we were going to build should have on it, and to pick up some stuff to outfit the table.
When it was time to wait in line to check out and to load the stuff into the car, he got to go and play in the room they have with the plastic ball pit and all of that. Spending time with him is fun, but there are some things four-year-olds are not going to handle well. Waiting in a long check-out line is one of those things.
The idea was to shorten the table down so it would work with a pair of plastic chairs he picked out. (I tried to get him to budge on the color -- but had no luck.) Here's the table. They say Ikea is cheap, but this is not a whole lot of product for $69.
First change was to notch the two short-end supports so we could have some of their plastic bins slide under the table surface for storage. I have to confess: I'm loving this Bosch jig saw.
Nothing clever on the slides. I just ran some cheap 1x2 stock underneath from one end to the other. The string is to keep the little bins from accidentally sliding all the way out.
I knew I wanted to paint the top with chalkboard paint -- so there's always a surface to write on. But I didn't want to simply cover the whole top with black if the table was going to be another color. So my idea was to use a router to cut a groove all the way around the table top so that there was a natural point to frame the color around the blackboard paint. As it happened, I didn't have the kind of bit that was in my head. So I used a v-shaped bit and just cut about an eighth of an inch into the surface. Here it is with blue paint (his choice) for the border around the chalkboard top.
And here's the whole thing as I finished painting it. The lift is handy for painting stuff like this, since you can raise it up and get better access from below.
And here's the finished deal. I bent some 1/4" round stock to hold a roll of paper we also got at Ikea. Then I used some thin spacers and screws to hold down a piece of 1/16" thick aluminum so the sheets could be torn off cleanly. I sanded one side of the strip for a sharper cutting edge and it works great.
In this second 'catalog shot,' you can see the edge of one of the white bins that slide out from underneath. We also put a little cutlery rack on either side of the thing to hold pens, markers and brushes.
It was a lot of fun to do it with him. He had some useful ideas and also some crazy ones. And at four, I think you have to give him a pretty long leash on how much he wants to actually help and when he's going to be happier inside with his mother. I let him help with the latex paint (for the chalkboard surface), but vetoed him working with the oil-based blue stuff, since he sometimes gets a little careless with a brush and there's just no room for blue in my garage.
