Doesn’t this look nice?
It does! That’s why it’s a shame it would have fallen apart and/or collapsed if you looked at it wrong. I say ‘would have’ (and fallen, and collapsed, and looked) because I turned these miscellaneous items into a fully functioning side table with less than $2 in parts.
The legs were a handy find at a restaurant liquidation – they’re a stand for a server’s tray, and probably cost me less than 50 cents. The top is a salvaged piece of good quality veneered particle board from a broken Ikea dresser I disassembled a while back. The dimensions worked and the pieces looked nice together. Keeping them together was the trick.
And that illusion was solved by two $0.48 pipe straps from the local hardware store and a handful of screws from the back room: