Love tea? You’ll go crazy over this IKEA tea table

We decided to convert the IKEA LIATORP coffee table into a tea table because we couldn’t find a tea box that was big enough to store our different teas.

We were also looking for a tea box with room for loose tea. In this IKEA tea table, there is that space in the middle of each compartment.

Materials:

LIATORP coffee table (Retails at €199. I bought it on a marketplace on the Internet for €15).

LIATORP coffee table | IKEA.com

RAJTAN spice jars (5 packs of 4 jars)
Wood strips at 5 cm wide

Tools:

Saw – we used a table saw
Glue and glue tongs
Sandpaper

How we made our IKEA tea table

The LIATORP coffee table has storage drawer underneath the glass table top. It comes in 4 separate compartments to help you keep things organized.

But the space in each section was still too large to properly divide our selection of teas. And tea bags would get jumbled up.

So this is how we divided each compartment:

Each compartment has dividers made of thin wood strips: 2 dividers at 37.5 centimeters and 2 dividers at 42 centimeters.

The longest boards have 2 notches, 7 centimeters from each end. The short boards have 2 notches at 7.5 centimeters from each end. (The reason for this is that tea bags are not square but rectangular).

You slide the boards together (just as you can slide two half Christmas trees together) on the notches. It makes an almost-square frame (42 x 38 centimeters) that fits in the compartment.

Then, there are 10 individual smaller dividers per compartment (to make separate tea compartments) which are 5 x 7.5 centimeters.

You glue the smaller dividers against the long boards. Each corner is finished with a rounded corner. Each section in the table has 36 rounded corners of 5 centimeters.

You need 159 centimeters (long boards) + 75 centimeters (smaller dividers) = 234 centimeters of boards per compartment.

For the 4 compartments together that is 936 centimeters (rounded 10-meter board x 5 centimeters wide).

The rounded corners are 180 centimeters per section. In total that is 720 centimeters.

After glueing everything, we sandpapered away the rough edges and varnished the dividers.

We organized tea bags in the smaller sections and loose leaf tea in RAJTAN spice jars.

Cost and time?

I don’t remember the costs.

Thinking, drawing and measuring took by far the most time. It took about a day to saw and glue everything. The glue has to dry for at least 24 hours. And then another day for the varnish to dry.

The IKEA LIATORP was, in the first place, a good and practical side table. But now, it is an eyecatcher.

All of our guests are excited about it. We love to drink tea. And now that we’ve everything in plain sight, we remember to pick different flavours. Before, we drank the same sort of tea every day. Boring