Coffee Table Height for Dummies

Coffee Table

We got tired of looking at freelancer posts about bike tires written by people who hadn't ridden a bicycle since getting their driver's licenses... so we looked elsewhere. Our gaze just happened to fall upon a topic about which no one here had given much thought: changing the height of a table. We've seen something like this before, but this time the approach was a little different. Let's take a look at what Jack. S. Waverly had to say to HomeSteady.com on the topic of "How to Adjust Coffee Table Height."¹

Waverly had a sort of tunnel vision about this process, as was revealed in his opening paragraph:

"Sometimes a table that looks good outside the home will appear too low once it is in the home. The solution is to adjust the height."

We had to wonder whether Jack S. had even bothered to think that the table might be too tall and need to be shortened, which is a problem that has generated millions of cartoons. It's not, however, the problem Jack wants to address. No, he thinks you should buy "leg extenders." Given, however, that Jack seems to believe that,

"Table height is normally 30 inches. If you have stools or tall chairs, such as dining chairs, you will want to raise the coffee table to 37 inches..."

...we aren't convinced he thought this particular project through!

However, we'll pretend that he actually only wanted to raise the height of the legs an inch or two – most coffee tables are between 18 and 20 inches high – and run with that. According to Waverly, you'll use

"...pre-turned furniture legs that you buy from the local home center..."

Oh, we suppose you might be able to find something that would work, although almost all of them at our local Lowe's are intended to go on the bottom of sofas or other furniture instead of act as "leg extenders." That being said, let's look at how Jack S. says to install them: "Find the center of one leg of the coffee table. Mark the center with the pencil. Drill a 2-inch hole into the leg at the mark. Make the hole 1/4 inch deep..." Wait, what? a "2-inch hole" that's "1/4 inch deep"? Is that even possible? In a word, "No." What Waverly did here was conflate building a doweled joint with whatever cockamamie idea he had for this project. The article Jack ripped off for this used ¼-inch dowels, presumably two inches long, not two-inch dowels ¼ inch long... What an idiot. Not only that, but Jack says to,

"...measure the length of leg you need[,] mark a line across one side at that height,[and] cut the leg to size... Repeat this with each leg."

Yeah, right. Only a total idiot (or a business writer) would follow these steps. Small wonder the Jack S. is our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_6188196_adjust-coffee-table-height.html

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