Years ago, I built a portable air filter to help with allergens in the house. It isn’t much to look at but it moves a lot of air. Basically a 1 ft x 1 ft x 2 ft box, it has an ultra-quiet bathroom exhaust fan inside that draws air through a standard home air filter in the front and pumps it out through a 4 inch port on the side. From there I can attach a dust collection hose to pipe the air to the other side of the room to promote circulation. Other than the on-off switch, that’s it. And the unit has worked well – it’s still quiet and based on how quickly the filter dirties up, it’s effective. Pretty ugly though – because I made it out of scrap wood, it needed to be painted instead of a nice wood finish. Not sure I chose a good color.

I decided to build another one but this time, it would be more of a piece of furniture and better looking. More of a woodworking project. After considering our needs, we decided the air filter could be a sofa end table. The current table is too small and too low. I’ll cut the suspense and show the final result now.

Same basic setup: an ultra-quiet fan drawing air through a standard filter and piping out through a 4″ port. This time though, the filter would be wholly inside the cabinet, smaller (12″ x 12″), and would draw air in through a louvered door. After playing around with fan orientation, I settled on having the filter on top with the fan mounted horizontally. That setup would allow room above the fan/filter for two narrow drawers. Additionally, because it is meant to be an end table, along with an on-off switch, I installed an electrical outlet to accommodate a tabletop lamp.

I like to use the wood I have on hand for projects if I can and I had a sufficient quantity of white oak, so that’s what I chose. For the side panels, which are 1/4″ plywood, I bought some white oak veneer. I had not used veneer before so that was new.

Mistakes were made. The biggest being a failure to properly account for the four vertical posts when I did the top piece, which was made from the best, most attractive cut of wood. The top turned out to be too small so I had to use other pieces to make a bigger one. The first top piece ended up being cut down for use as the two drawer fronts. The next biggest mistake was a goof in installing the door. The louvers ‘point’ up instead of down. That’s not so bad – it may even be beneficial in terms of drawing air from the room rather than the floor. But it wasn’t what I had intended.

Here’s the new top. I failed to take a photo of the original.

And some miscellaneous build photos.

One final note. This summer, Oregon had horrendous wildfires, as did Washington and California. The air quality in my town reached and stayed at ‘extremely unhealthy’ levels for a long while. Because I use near HEPA filters in my units and the house’s FAU (forced air unit), they’re effective at capturing smoke particles. So along with the FAU and my first portable unit, I pressed this new one temporarily into service before the cabinet was complete.