This sofa arm table is a great solution for small spaces and using plumbing pipe to make it gives it a fun industrial look! Here’s how you can make a table just like this!
As you know, we live in a house that is over 120 years old. A house like that comes with all kinds of interesting quirks and challenges. One of the issues that we have is that the rooms are all really strange sizes compared to what you would find in a more modern house made for our current lifestyles. We’re so lucky to have a kitchen that’s absolutely huge by today’s standards, but our living room is quite small. Furniture was definitely much smaller 120 years ago and people didn’t do much loungin’ back then either! 🙂 We have a nice big sectional sofa in our living room, which fits all of our family members, both two- and four-legged quite comfortably, but it doesn’t leave too much room for things like side tables. That’s how this clever sofa arm side table project came to be!
Our New Sofa Arm Table
Have you seen a sofa arm side table before? They basically fit right over the arm of your sofa and allow you to turn it into a table so you have a place to put down a mug, a snack, or whatever else you need next to you when you’re sitting down without taking up any floor space.
It occurred to me just a few weeks ago that this was the perfect solution for us so I asked Chris if he had any interest in whipping one up for us. He said he’d build one, but only if he could use metal as one of the materials, so I came up with the idea to use plumbing pipe and I love how it turned out. It’s definitely a little more industrial in style than what I usually use in our home, but I think it works really nicely with farmhouse style too.
How to Make a Plumbing Pipe Sofa Arm Table
The first thing you’ll want to do is measure the height of the arm of your sofa. Most will be between 25-30 inches, but you really want this table to fit nicely right over the top of the arm, so it’s a good idea to measure.
Next, head to the plumbing section of your local hardware store and start playing around with different pieces! The good thing about this project is that all of the different pipe pieces just screw together so you can really pretty much build your whole table base and measure to make sure it will fit before you buy anything.
Here are some plans that Chris drew up for the pipe pieces that you can use if you want to build a table exactly like ours so you can see what types of pieces you’ll need to pick up.
- Qty 6 – 1/2″ Tee
- Qty 4 – 1/2″ Elbow
- Qty 2 – 1/2″ x 24″ Pipe
- Qty 4 – 1/2″ x 5″ Pipe
- Qty 2 – 1/2″ x Close Pipe
This design not only looks good, but it also stands up really well, which is obviously fairly important! 🙂
How to Assemble Your Plumbers Pipe Base for Your Sofa Arm Table
Once you’ve found all of your pieces, it’s really just a matter of screwing them all together!
Here’s how our table base looked when it was all assembled.
We finished the base off by spray painting it using an oil rubbed bronze spray paint.
For the chunky wooden top for our table, we just used two pieces of 2×6 and attached them together using dowels and some wood glue.
I stained it up using my usual Early American stain and it almost looks like one big, beautiful chunk of wood!
The top is attached with these plastic plumbing fittings.
We used plastic so they’d be super easy to cut. We wanted just a little bit sticking out of the top of the pipes.
We drilled shallow holes into the bottom of the wooden table top and fit the top right over the plastic pieces to hold it in place.
The Finished Sofa Arm Table
Here’s our sofa arm table in the living room! It’s been so super handy to have on this side of the room and it’s a pretty eye-catching piece too!
Do you have a spot where you could use a sofa arm table like this?
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.