MARBLE COFFEE TABLE DIY TUTORIAL

[This post contains some gifted items]

I’m near the end of my living room makeover, but one thing I’ve struggled with along the way is the coffee table. It’s not the hugest of spaces, and while we need a coffee table, we also wanted something we could put our feet up on.

After scouring the internet, we found the ideal one for the room - the plinth coffee table from Menu. One problem, it costs about £1,600. 😭

So, we set about thinking about how we could come up with something similar. We spotted these marble-effect tiles from Mandarin Stone with a beaut rust-colour veining that sparked an idea. Could we cover a MDF box in tiles and create the same look?

There were a couple of issues we’d need to figure out however. Firstly, there wasn’t a way realistically that we were going to be able to cut these tiles ourselves and keep the really clean lines we needed.This meant we had to make it beholden to the sizes that the tiles came in. Luckily for us, the Mandarin Stone tiles (which were gifted btw!) came in a square and rectangle format, at the same width. This meant we could use two squares for the top, two rectangles for the length on each side, and then one rectangle at either end.

Secondly, as the tiles had a flat edge, there’d be no way to piece them together without one raw edge of the ceramic showing at every join. We looked at how easy it would be to mitre these edges, we looked at tile trim, but nothing was really working for us.

Our solution in the end was to buy pieces of beading, mitre the edges to meet at the corners and then sand them down into a smooth join. I then stuck it down with Gorilla glue, painted it black and grouted it with the same dark grout to fill in the gaps. I was pretty happy with the final result!

Okay, and here’s the sums of what we spent…

Tiles = £101.44
MDF = £29.74
Tile adhesive = £18
Tile grout = £9.84
Gorilla glue = £5.98

= £165

The fact that it rounds up to a whole number is weirdly pleasing!

What do you think? Drop me a comment below and let me know.. You can find the full step by step over on my Instagram stories if you fancy following it yourself too!