DIY bedside table with a built-in plug socket

My wife's side of the bed had become a mountain of books, charger cables, tissues, hand cream and the occasional hairdryer (that one's mine). We've always said we'd buy proper bedroom furniture and never have, so I decided to just make something. With "Sheila's" permission, and her right to bleep anything she didn't want on the internet, I set out to build her a DIY bedside table in a day, with room for all of it.

The challenge was not to overthink the design: no CAD, no 3D modelling, just start cutting. That went well until I realised I'd got the measurements wrong. Mocking it up showed the sides were a bit too wide, so I added a cut-out, which ended up being one of my favourite features. The best design is when you can't take anything more away, not when you can't add anything more.

A built-in plug socket

The table is built from MDF. I wanted a desk-style plug socket built in, which needed a perfect 80 mm hole, and I don't own a hole saw. I laser-cut a circle as a template, cut roughly inside it with a jigsaw and cleaned it up with a flush-trim bit in the router. I filled the screw holes for a seamless finish (with wall filler, since I didn't have wood filler).

Painting MDF for a clean finish

Finishing MDF edges is all about the undercoat. One coat makes the cut edges swell, so sand the high spots flat, then apply a second coat and you get a crisp, clean edge. I also shared my favourite painting hack: never wash your roller again. Just leave it sitting in the paint tin, fish it out when you need it, and lever it off on the tin's edge when you're done.

Finishing touches

For all the small bits I used a free online box generator (MakerCase) to design a laser-cut tray with one rounded corner and a square back. The finishing touch is a Philips LED lamp that runs on battery but recharges over USB.

The result took a bit more than one day, but it's open on one side so everything is visible and easy to reach, deep enough to swallow the book pile without hiding things at the back, and it got the all-important customer sign-off.