Slap a map on that table!

Living together with a partner means that sometimes, different tastes collide and you've got to work around it. We decided to do that by combining (industrial and shabby chic for example goes rather well together), choosing things we both like and creating different corners. We don't have much room to work with that. If we get the apartment we're hoping for (which might be decided tomorrow, so I'm crossing my fingers so hard it's nearly impossible to type), we don't really have much more room than we do now. In fact, it's about 4sqm. But the overall layout is very different.

Anyways! While the man will get his own little room for his music (he has to give up on the basement room because the apartment doesn't have one, so he's at least getting that), I'll make do with a corner for myself. We started making a little corner like that for my desk and things like that in our current apartment and used the bedroom for it, but since the new bedroom will be smaller and we're getting a bigger bed at some point, that won't work. I'll have to find a corner for myself in the living room!

To get to the point - we built a small desk for that corner. I don't have tutorial pictures or exact measurements because we just used what we found and I didn't think of photographing the process. But it went like this: We went to the hardware store to get some wood. We used a long rectangular pole and had it cut to pieces that were each 70cm long. We also took the rest of the wood back home with us to use it on the table. While looking through the cut-wood-for-cheap section, we found the perfect piece for only 2€ and took that with us as well. We still had white paint at home and I recently bought a book with old maps on ebay (it was an accident, but I knew it'd come in handy one day!), so we were all set.

The Doctor put all the pieces together, drilled holes, screwed it tight. He used the leftover wood to secure the table legs in the front and in the back to give it more stability. In the meantime, I cut out the maps that I liked and made sure they had the right proportions. I measured the piece of pole that secures the table legs in the front and then sized the map pieces accordingly. With all that done, I painted the table completely. True, I could've done that beforehand, but we don't have much room for work like that as it is and wanted to get it done quickly.

I let the paint dry overnight, laid the map pieces out in the order I wanted them to be and then started on the table the next morning. I used mod podge to secure the pieces and sealed them with it afterwards. There was one line of maps on the front pole and one on the edge of the tabletop. Now, while I did my best to make sure all the pieces had the same size, there were a few that were just a millimeter longer or shorter and it didn't look as nice as I wanted it.

And while I was restlessly strolling through the apartment, trying to think of a way to fix that, I remembered the gold paint spray we used on our balcony. I masked the desk except for one small stripe on the edge of the maps, sprayed it, let it dry and tadaa- you can hardly see where the map pieces end and it's a clean stripe now.

That's the finished project! It has a few wrinkles and you can see the wood texture through in some places, but that's what I like about it. I wanted it to be imperfect and since I'm not a perfect furniture builder, that's pretty much what I get every time I build! It was super easy and fun to build and I love it.