Phone Booth Bottom from Thrift Store Furniture

Last week we took a look inside a 1950s Automatic Electric Rotary Payphone and the internal components looked great. After hooking it up to a modular line it has a dial tone and can even receive calls. It just can’t dial out …yet. As we wait on our pulse-to-tone converter it’s time to start building a phone booth that doubles up as a workstation for today’s work-from-home entrepreneurs. To keep with our 1950s atomic age style, we’re going to be mashing up and modding thrift store furniture to make up the bottom of our phonebooth-workstation.

Will it look cohesive or like a bunch of junk screwed together?

I liked the metal legs from an old elementary school desk and thought they’d make a great addition to a night stand I found. It was relatively easy to drill and dremel out the rivets holding the leg frame to the body of the school desk but things got complicated when I tried to attach the legs to the bottom of the nightstand.

The nightstand already has legs so adding the metal ones looked a bit odd. But the main challenge was the supporting wood blocks and kickplate that was dove-tailed in. Unfortunately these pieces had been glued! So began the epic battle between me, vinegar, a hammer and decades old glue! It took quite a bit of forceful negotiations to remove them. Vinegar works great at loosening glue between joints. Had I let the joints soak in vinegar overnight, we probably would have had an easier time removing the extra pieces.

In the end, we were left with a smooth bottom and the next steps are to line it with a piece of 3/4″ plywood so the legs have something sturdy to attach to and cut the nightstand’s legs off so the bottom is flush.