Beer Bottle Cap Table: A How Not to Guide

Since every middle age suburban mother is in dire need of a piece of furniture inspired by a college dorm room, I decided to try my hand at a beer bottle cap table.  When I had a newborn baby.  And three other kids.  And then I wrote this post.

But because "baby brain" is in fact a very real and acute condition, I totally and completely forgot to take the pictures, much less publish the post.  Until now...a mere two years later.

How do I get one of these wonderful contraptions for my OWN home or dorm room, you ask?  It's not even as hard as it looks:

1) Choose an optimum time to begin. In this case, I decided that when my baby was a couple weeks old would be wonderful because obviously...who doesn't start projects involving resin when they have a newborn?  Particularly when they've never once used resin...ever.

2) Have friends bring you bottle caps from near and far, including but not limited to Canada, Germany, and Israel.  Or buy them from Etsy.  Or collect them at gas station parking lots.  Or some combination of the three.

3) Or drink all the beer and save the caps.  That would work too.  Although you might need to adjust the size of the table, so you can make sure and finish the table before your liver gives out.

4) Arrange bottle caps at your leisure.  UNTIL baby begins to crawl, at which time baby notices the irresistible lure of these fine choking hazards and constantly throws the carefully laid pattern into total disarray.

5) Frantically glue down bottle caps the moment baby has begun her nap. Start with superglue, as per Pinterest instructions, but realize that the task will take decades at minimum. Switch to hot glue after gluing fingers to several surfaces and reading about a two year old who super glued her eyes shut.

6) Tape edges of table. Realize that unlike the table in the pinterest instructions, top of table is not sealed to the bottom. Seal using duct tape.

7) Scan comment section of instructions for advice. Read that original instructions were stolen. Ask around for more instructions.

8) Mix and pour resin. Quickly realize that duct tape is a completely inadequate adhesive for the table underside. Take stepdaughter up on her offer to buy more resin while watching resin pour out the bottom.

9) Attempt to remove tape and extra resin with pliers, scissors, and knives.  Fail miserably.  Put table in living room anyway.  Because do you really need to be as delicate as all that if you're going to end up with the college dorm room look?

My apologies to the original post where I saw this two years ago.  Sort of.  The fact of it is, the entire post was stolen from another website and would never have worked anyway, even if I had followed the instructions.  Wood and metal can barely contain that stuff.  Duct tape did NOT contain it.  So I doubt very much that painter's tape and tin foil in the post I saw would have held it in.

I do have a couple of very real instructions if you do choose to try this at home:

1) Buy extra resin, in case yours runs all over the place like mine did.

2) Don't worry about what adhesive you use for putting the bottle caps on.  I can NOT tell which were done with super glue and which were done with hot glue.  All the super glue did was cause me tons of anxiety due to my newfound irrational fear of getting that stuff in my eye.

Happy decorating!