Building our Ecobrick table

From the very beginning of our ecobrick journey, we always knew what we wanted to make .... A little table for our spare bedroom / study. After waiting patiently for two and a months, we had filled enough ecobricks to make our table. This is how we made it .....

Step 1: Decorating the ecobricks

We chose to decorate our ecobricks with clippings from a newspaper. We don’t generally buy newspapers but I had been given a free one when collecting my son from playschool one day, and inside it was a pull out commemorating 100 years of women voting in Ireland. There were some beautiful illustrations accompanying these articles so I cut them and an accompanying poem out. I also found a few articles on climate change within the newspaper and I cut these out too.

Having pieced together the newspaper clippings for each bottle, I then used Hodge Podge in matt to glue / paint them onto the ecobricks. I didn’t decorate the bottle tops. I just left them as they were.

Step 2: Fixing the lids to the tabletop

Once the bottles had dried, it was time to move onto the next step .... fixing the lids to the tabletop. We had decided some time ago that we wanted a slice of a tree to be the top for our table. Having foraged in some local woods unsuccessfully, I found one in the Christmas section of a furniture and garden centre near to our home. It was on sale having been some sort of Christmas decoration so was relatively cheap at €7.

DISCLAIMER: My husband Dave helped me with the next bit!

On the slice of wood, I measured and marked out the places where I wanted the bottle “legs” to go so that they would be evenly placed apart. Dave then drilled two holes through each lid of the bottles and drilled the lids (top against the wood) into the slice of wood using washers and flat head screws.

Step 3: Screwing the bottles into place

Finally, we twisted each bottle into its lid and Wallah .... a finished and unique piece of furniture that is helping to keep plastic out of the environment :)

One of our favourite things about this table is it can be disassembled easily (just unscrew the bottles) and stored away when needed!

UPDATE:

I don't know whether it was my husband's aggressive hoovering style or bad design, but the table got knocked a couple of times and the bottle cap of one of the bottles cracked and so I couldn't screw the bottle in anymore. After making an ecobrick module using silicon, I had an idea. I twisted off all the bottles from the table, unscrewed the bottle caps, fixed new bottle caps onto the bottles (so there would be no screw holes in them), turned the bottles upside down and fixed them to the table top using silicon. Once the silicon was dry, I had a much sturdier table.

The downside ... I can't remove the legs from the table anymore for easy storage. Also, as the bottles are upside down now, so too are the pictures and text that I decorated with them. But on the upside I still have a perfectly good table that I made myself and that I think its quite nice looking :)