Community Brag Posts

Second project we under took after stumbling over this blog. The armorie fit well in our bed room and has enough space for all my Indian sarees. Added a jewelery drawer in the middle. Love your blog Ana, thanks for the great work you do. Next project is to build a bed to match the armorie.

I love the look of diamond tufting, so that's how I did the upholstered insert, which added hours to the project. The frame itself was built in about 3 hours, so this could easily be an afternoon project if you skipped the tufting.

How to build a simple laptop desk to use when working from the couch. This was a quick build from a woodworking plan found on the Ana White website. We added a small storage area for my blogging binder. 

I adapted the plan for the Shoe Rack Bench to give it multiple levels and allow it to serve as an entryway table in addition to a shoe rack. I used 2 x 10's for the project.

This was a simple project, super easy to do if you need an inexpensive bed for a young child. It freed up floor space in our son's small room, which he loves.

This bed was built completely out of necessity. Our old 30 year old bed (including mattress) had given me my last backache. A new bed and mattress set was too expensive so I decided to build the bed and spend the saved money on a mid class mattress. So glad I did! What I built seems waaaay better than what we could have afforded. And it only took me a long weekend plus a few days waiting for stain and polyurethane to dry. Plus the return trips to HD to purchase new lumber after making wrong cuts and the cheap furring strip I bought at first continuously split on me.o t

I wanted the box spring to fit inside of the frame as much as possible. I realized the farm house queen bed plan plus the platform bed plan that I was using did not do that a bit late. By then I had already glued and screwed on the side rails. So I just flipped the frame around and decided to go with that side. Later I realized that the inside width of the bed was 57!! (60 - 3 for the frame) so I needed to return to the store to get new wood for the frame since what I cut already was 3 inches too short. My already built headboard and foot board also would not fit like the plan suggested so I needed to improvise. What you see is mainly my improvisations as a result of many, many mistakes.

My bed has two sets of legs. I did not trust the headboard and footboard legs as I could not attach them as described so I added a set to the frame itself. I also made the upholstery so that I could easily change it by unscrewing it from the head and footboards.

My son chose this system for his room (minus one bookcase - the room wasn't large enough!) and even painted a few of the pieces himself! he's very tall so I lengthened the bed to 92" which is the length of the extra-long mattresses. For the time being, I added 6" high-density foam to the end of his mattress. I also used plywood with edge banding instead of 1x12 boards.

This project has been a long time coming and I'm so excited that it is finally finished. We modified the plans to better fit our media center opening, so it is about the same dimensions as the original Pottery Barn Benchwright TV Stand. We also used true dimension lumber, so we adjusted the measurements based on that. This is definitely my favorite project to date!

For my son's 7th birthday, I promised him a new lofted bed. I poured over different designs, drooled over all of the different things I could make, worried about whether or not I could actually do it. Nothing in the market fit my requirements or my budget... I was determined to make this for my son.

Over the long weekend, this bed was constructed... a little "Loft Bed", a little "Claire", a little "Cabin" and a little inspired innovation and ta-da: The Fred-enstien Bed :)

Claire guardrails and bookshelf supports
Modified Claire Desk (work in progress)
Cabin Headboard
Custom built storage shelf stairs (he didn't want a ladder)

Next weekend will be touching up the paint and installing the remaining bookshelves

It's a little twist on Ana's Coat organizer. Turned out really useful and did not cost me anything since I ussed scrap wood. I wish I would build have built one for coats as well.

I needed an end table that was a little bigger than the average end table - I had a space to fill in a corner between a couch and chair and was tired of the blank space being used as a dumping ground for...things my kids didn't want to put away or throw away. :) So I pulled ideas from a couple projects here and came up this. The cost was free since I just used the leftover wood from other projects we'd done and paint we already had lying around.

Thanks for the instructions! Here's my version. I haven't built much of anything before, but I needed it in my basement to handle kids' stuff. My version is 18 feet long. I combined a 12-foot and 6-foot 2x4 to get that length, which meant less cutting, which I had done at Lowe's (for free). I used the 6-foot 2x4s throughout the shelf to ensure it was strong (in other words, I didn't want a 12-foot "section" and a weaker 6-foot "section" added on).

I was able to get everything in my car but the ride home was slow. I also had to use my egress window to get the 12-foot boards in the basement.

Total cost for me was about $170 including a couple boxes of screws and wood glue. I could've easily spent double the cost on store-bought shelving. Thanks for the plans!

My husband and I built this counter height with specs of 351/2" high x 25" wide x 48" long. We are using it in our kitchen as a prep island.

My oldest son really wanted a toy cash register, and he loves pretending he has a Bait & Tackle shop. I built the market base where the front side is for "Will's Stop 'n' Shop" and it can be turned around and used for "Wyatt's Bait and Tackle". The countertop holds the cash register and shopping basket perfectly. They are great Shopkeepers!

I made this garden trellis with cheap 6' cedar fence pickets ripped down to 1 1/2" strips. Get the free plans and tutorial at The Handyman's Daughter!

This is a twist on the Modular Family Entryway Mudroom System - Pullout Rolling Bench Cart . There have been many posts on the net for a mudroom locker set such as the one I have. In our case we had a mudroom with a closet, not much room to move when sliding the doors open, and as well we have kids that need a place to sit in order to put boots/shoes etc on. I took advantage of my husband's work assignment out of the country to rip back the closet,to 20 inches deep and open it up and added a bench for seating, baskets above for out of season/rarely used stuff, and used rolling cubbies below, but in my case I wanted storage bins instead. My thinking was so that I could make it look clean pretty quickly by just chucking every thing in to the bin... These are tall enough for our boots. In the bottom of the bins I put a piece of outdoor carpeting, then a plastic grid, and over that another layer of outdoor carpeting so if the footwear is wet it will drain and dry-no biggie to vacume or sweep out. Best deal: I can simply roll them out of the way when I want to sweep underneath! I measured cubby space to basket size above, and made the bins below after doing the bench and middle supports, to ensure a good fit. The bench top is an old piece of pine board I sanded, stained and used 4 coats of marine varnish so it would take lots of wear and tear.