DIY LEGO DUPLO Table with Storage Space

Create a fun DIY LEGO DUPLO table for your littles ones to play at! Upcyle an old coffee table and turn it into a fun place for creativity and building!

Hello Crafty Friends! Today I’m excited to share a fun DIY LEGO DUPLO table you can make using an old coffee table. My husband and I are big LEGO fans and while our toddler is still a little too young for them, he loves DUPLO. We decided to make him a DUPLO table for Christmas this year. Our table features two huge DUPLO plates plus smooth painted roads where he can drive his DUPLO cars. The shelf underneath the table is perfect for LEGO storage. 

Creating a table is great for both LEGO and DUPLO play because it creates a dedicated space where creations can be left up for more than a day. Even at a young age, it is fun to keep DUPLO creations up for while. They act as a great invitation for quiet and creative play.

Since our child is a toddler, almost preschool age, so wanted to make a short table that was just the right height for him. A coffee table is perfect for this! Lucky (or maybe not so lucky) for us, we have a lot of old furniture in our basement family members have given us when they’ve moved or cleaned out. We had a perfect coffee table in our basement that was just holding boxes, so we decided to give it a make-over and turn it into the perfect DUPLO table!

The great thing about upcycling is saving on cost. We definitely looked at purchasing a new LEGO table. There are a lot of great options out there but we wanted a table that was the right size for our preschooler and didn’t want to spend too much as we knew he would eventually outgrow the size. Below you can see the table before and after our coffee table makeover. The shelf underneath is perfect for holding our bins of DUPLO.

Our table could fit two large DUPLO plates and then we painted a track around them for DUPLO trains and cars. It has been so fun having a smooth surface for the cards since they won’t ride easily over the studded plates. Placing a road between the two plates has also created a really fun opportunity for bridges and tunnels! 

Why DUPLO Tables are an Awesome Idea for Little Ones

• They create a dedicated space for DUPLO
• DUPLOS allow for open-ended creativity and exploration
• DUPLOS are great for fine motor skills
• For little ones, a table creates a place off of the floor for them to stand and build working on their coordination and balance
• The table creates an enticing invitation for creative play 
• Many tables can include storage solutions
• A table allows kids, even littles ones, to leave up their creations to display and come back to

Five Year Update on our DUPLO Table

Our DUPLO table has held up really well over the years and was used so much by our kids. Even after our kids moved on to actual LEGO they still used their DUPLO pieces with their Hubelino marble runs, so this table was used over six years! When we were ready to move on to a new table we were able to easily remove the plates by unscrewing them. The plates are still used with our Hubelino pieces (just not on the table) and the holes we drilled in them have never been an issue. All this to say – I’m glad we didn’t permanently adhere the plates to the table! The plates are still getting use 7 years later :) 

Supplies Needed for DUPLO Table

• Low coffee table or something similar
• Colorful acrylic paint (you may also need sandpaper and primer)
• Black and white paint acrylic paint for roads
• Two 15″ LEGO DUPLO baseplates
• #6 Drill Bit and Countersink to use with a cordless drill
• Wood Screws #6 x 1/2″ – we used 18 screws total
• Optional: I used a Ralph Lauren Double-Needle Stitch Paint Tape to make my dashed lines on the road – you can also make them free hand or use Painters Tape to help guide your dashed lines.
• DUPLOS to help with spacing the plates and for playtime!

How to Make a DIY LEGO DUPLO Table

Step One: Prepare your table!  This will mean different things depending on the table you plan on using. You could use an old table in need of some TLC, like we did, or buy a new table that is already painted and ready to go! In our case we needed to sand, prime, and paint our table. We used primer and paints my mom had. She had all these little cans of primary colors she used to paint birdhouses years ago. Since one can of paint wouldn’t have been enough for the whole table, we decided to embrace the primary colors and use them all! I think it works for a kid’s DUPLO table!

STEP 2:  Paint the roads!  My son has lots of DUPLO cars and a DUPLO train so we thought it would be fun to add roads around the table. We also decided to add roads because the table wasn’t wide enough to fit three DUPLO plates but two plates left a lot of unused space. We added a road in between the boards which I’m so glad we did! It is perfect for bridges and tunnels and has been one of the most fun parts of this table makeover. I used black acrylic paint for the roads and did two coats.

After the roads are painted with black paint, add white dash lines down the center. You can do this lots of different ways. When researching online I saw clever ideas like cutting out little rectangles from white label stickers. I found a painting kit my mom had from back in the day – a Ralph Lauren Denim Technique kit – to make your walls look like real denim! Yes, my sister rocked the denim walls for all of high school!

The kit came with a stitch maker set complete with tape that could be easily laid down and painted over to create the stitch marks. I used this and painted every fourth stitch mark and it worked great. While I had to go back and touch up each “stitch”, it worked really well for spacing my dashes and keeping them in a straight line. 

We put the plates on before the white ticking because that is when my husband was available to do it. I’d recommend getting all the painting done first!

Step Four:  Layout the plates. Decide where to put your DUPLO plates on the table. We needed to get some of our DUPLO building pieces to figure this out. We wanted to make sure the DUPLO car and train could fit down the road in the center of the two plates and we wanted there to be an even number of LEGO spaces in-between the boards. This is really important so that buildings and bridges can connect from one plate to the next.

Step Five: Attach the plates! This was the most important part in putting our table together. A lot of the other DIY LEGO tables I saw online glued their boards to the table. Since we knew we wanted these DUPLO plates to be removable, we didn’t want to glue them to the table permanently. We decided to screw them in which worked really well. My husband had to buy a new drill bit with a countersink built in (about $6) which would make the screw sit flush with the boards.  If the screw wasn’t flush with the boards, it would stick up and the DUPLOS wouldn’t sit flat.

Using the drill bit and countersink attachment for your drill, drill a hole into the each corner of your plate. The countersink is the larger part of the drill bit that creates a beveled place for the top of the screw to sit. Since this drill bit is meant for wood, go really slow because it can over drill and drill out too big of a hole.  

Plastic spirals will happen as the countersink strips the plastic. You can tear these off and clean out the hole with your finger.  

Using a screwdriver, screw a wood screw into your drilled hole.

You can see, by keeping the screw flush to the LEGO plates, the DUPLOS will sit properly.

We used 18 wood screws – 9 in each plate. We did the four corners first and one directly in the center of each plate. After testing it out, we added four more in the center of each side.  This way when you pull up on a DUPLO piece, the board stays down instead of coming up. We decided not to paint the screw heads but you could of course paint them to match the plates.

Step Six: Add DUPLO storage. We added two bins to the shelf underneath to hold all of our DUPLOS. The bins are easy to slide out which is perfect for little ones. The table is now finished and ready to be played with! This was such a fun gift to surprise my son with and it has been getting SO much use!

Shop our Favorite DUPLO sets for Little Kids

• LEGO DUPLO First Building Set
• LEGO DUPLO Starter Set with Storage Box
• DUPLO My First Number Train or My First Alphabet Truck
• LEGO DUPLO Town Airplane and Airport
• LEGO DUPLO Creative Building Time