Community Brag Posts

I'm so glad I found your blog/website. It is exactly what I was looking for. I'm going to tackle the farm table & benches next and then adjust the porch swing plan to make a bed swing for a friend. Thanks for the great ideas!

I needed a smaller table than the one I had, so I decided to build a new one. I loved the look of the Modern Farm table that was posted on this site and I just modified the plans to make it a 36" x 36" square. I finished it with a Kona stain.

My daughters decided they wanted to do a lemonade stand at their Nana's yard sale.  I'm a beginner when it comes to woodworking projects so when I came across Ana's plans for the fence picket lemonade stand, I just HAD to give it a try!  This was a fun project and the plans were extremely helpful and straight-forward.  I would definitely recommend if anyone is looking for a cute lemonade stand for their kiddos!  Side note - my girls raised $75 for the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation to help fight childhood cancer! So proud! 

We built these beds Nov/Dec 2012 for our boys ages 2 & 4. This was our first furniture project. It was fairly easy but I did learn a few things along the way. They may seams dumb to most of you, but being our first project we encountered a few problems. My #1 tip is to cut your pieces, THEN SAND THEM. Before constructing the beds. We sanded afterwards, and trying to sand in the little gaps between the slats was hard. Like other posts, we had some trouble with the ladder. The side pieces were not long enough. We just re cut them and added another "rung". The finish is Valspar's Fly By Night blue. It is a very deep navy. Although I sanded my heart out and used a whole tub of wood filler they are still made using 2x4s and have dings and nicks that just come with soft woods. Our boys love them, and no they're not perfect but I think it will work to our advantage. Now when the boys act like boys I'm not away or stressing or any little dings they might be creating to the bed.

My first woodwork project from the DIY on this website and I'm very happy with how it turned out!

For the most part I followed the plans for the legs and base structure as suggested. In our area the 2x4s are sold with rounded corners. To avoid a very obvious seam on the legs, I used 2x6s which I screwed and glued together then cut back to 3x4 (1.5x2) x 4 to make the legs and cross beams a little beefier with little or no seem on the legs. As I decided to build the top from reclaimed wood I framed in the top with 2x4 ripped down to approx.. 2x3 with a sheet of plywood to support top boards. As I don’t have a planner to level any reclaimed top boards I could find, I decided to make my own faux reclaimed boards out of ¾’ x 9’ – 8’ planks. I distress the wood using a chain, rocks my table saw, hammer, nails, blowtorch and bow saw. In hindsight, I wish I had distressed a little more vigorously but everyday use will augment it over time. I continued to paint, distress and sand on the fly, using paints I had left from previous projects. In some cases, I mixed paints to get additional colour varierty. All boards were stained at the to colour bare areas which as a bonus added a slight yellow hue making the paint look older. I did some scraping and blowtorching of semi-dry paint and stain to get a variety of looks and textures. I dry fit the boards and reorganized the puzzle pieces to get a random but organized look – controlled chaos. Once I was close I glued and screwed the board down clamping as I went to keep the boards tight. This paid-off later as the tighter seams allow less food to fall in-between. I cut down the last row from over sized pieces to get a tight fit in the last row. I finished with 11 coats of poly to toughen up the pine and again to seal the seams from food. My wife suggested painting the legs off-white as our cottage already is max-ed out on natural wood. We will follow by painting the existing chairs the same off-white and adding a little distress for age. Cost was approx. $175 to 200. The plywood alone was $45, paint I had. Time was easily 50 hours as the artistic on the top, time although fun, was time consuming.

Anna’s website is great I have had many compliments on my table. I have pointed many people to the site for direction on their own projects. Thanks for the great plans.

Sandy

My grandfather built the base for this table decades ago. I never got to know him because I was very young when he passed. I told my mom that I loved this table and she gave it to me under the condition that we split it into two pieces. I get the base and she gets the top. That way I can build 2 tables from this and we can both keep the memory.

I made a new table top from Brazilian Mahogany and painted the base that was made from pine. Soon I will be making a new base to attach to the old table top and send it to my mother.

Minwax Antique Oil Finish is awesome. I have trouble with finishing and this worked like a dream. No stain was used.

Rustic x end table build

First ever wood project. Under $200 in materials! Less than a weekend of work (for two people). Beautiful results!!!!! Built from plans on Ana-White.com The only change we made to the build was adding some additional support legs in the middle of the bed. 

We built a pair of these for our kids. Wanted to surprise them with a little shelf for each and it was really easy to do. Kids never saw them until it was all done since we bought the wood for this at the same time as we bought the wood for our own bed that we made.

Spray painted them using Krylon spray paint had more trouble locating appropriate paint (needed pink & purple seems most places didn't have this actually in stock!) than we had making the actual shelves. Took quite a few coats of paint though to get them looking nice.

Biggest complication that we actually had was finding the wood in suitable straight pieces. Ended up taking quite a while to select suitable pieces since most were bowed or warped to the point of being useless for our needs.

Final result though looks great and the kids absolutely love them. They are perfectly sized for water bottles and both kids had them in usage within mere minutes of them going up on the wall.

I recently found a photo of Pottery Barn Kids Box Train shelves. The have been discontinued, so I decided to build a set of my own. They were really easy! I was able to build 3 shelves from (2) 1 x 8's, (1) 1 x 4, and (1) 2 x 4. Plans, silhouette file, and printable image available in my blog post. 

I always have heaps of scrap wood so I decided to make some lanterns.

These lanterns are larger than the last lanterns I made.

They are huge and they make a great statement.

I used old rusty fencing wire for the handles.

I also added some alluminium sheet to the 'ceilling' of the lantern so that there is no risk of burning.

The only cost was for the candles.

The legs of this table are made from douglas fir purchased at my local big box home improvement store.  The table top is made of hard maple that i purchased from a local mill.  I modified the dimensions from the original plan because i really liked the look of the 4x4 legs.  The douglas fir is relatively inexpensive material and because the legs for the most part unseen once you have chairs.  I chose hard maple because i have three kids under the age of 6 that can destroy anything in their path. So having a kitchen table that could double as a nuclear bomb shelter was high on my priority list.

I recommend you purchase your wood from a local mill.  There are few technical terms you will need to learn before heading over to purchase your wood stock.  For example, lumber mills sale their wood stock by the board foot (width x length x depth) and if you want a 1 inch thick board you will need to ask for 5/4 board (pronounced five quarters) Marc Spagnolia (aka: The Wood whisperer) has a great 5 minute video that gives you all the information you need to walk into a lumber yard with confidence and purchase what you need.  KEY POINT: make sure your boards are straight and square. If your boards are not straight and square, it will cause you problems down the stretch.  In order to achieve this you must joint and plain your boards.  Since I do not have a jointer or plainer, I asked the lumber mill if they could help me out and they were nice enough to do it for an extra $25 dollars.  Well worth it in my opinion.

I did purchase one tool for this job, a biscuit joiner.  A biscuit joiner makes small cuts in the sides of your boards.  Small wooden biscuits are inserted in these slots and help keep your boards level when you glue up your boards.  They do not add any strength to your glue joints, but will save you a lot of time sanding your table top perfectly flat. I won’t go into a lot of detail on how to glue your boards up.  There are lot of great YouTube videos that give pretty good advice on the glue-up of your table top.

After you get your table top glued up, it is time to sand.  KEY POINT: Sand by sight, not by feel.  Your table top may feel really smooth to the touch, but when you go to stain, small swirl marks can make your final product look lackluster.  Invest the time in sanding.  I suggest getting some hallogen lights and put at the end of your table.  These lights help you see those imperfections that need to be sanded out. Also, I recommend using an orbital sander.  Be sure not to put any downward pressure, let the sander do the work.  Putting downward pressure is so tempting, but ultimately causes deep gauges in your wood that take even longer to sand out.

So one thing that I did learn when doing this project was that hard maple is one of the toughest types of wood to stain.  The wood is a very dense with tight porosity. This is what makes hard maple extremely durable and pretty, but unfortunately very difficult to stain. Most stains leave the maple looking blotchy (dark and light color all over the boards).  It was really frustrating trying to figure out how to stain this type of wood.  I searched the entire internet looking for tips on staining hard maple with very little luck.  So if you’re interested in using this wood…here is my playbook that produced pretty good results.  First of all you should really avoid the pigment type stains.  These are your run of the mill stains you find at your big box store.  I also had terrible luck with gel stains as well.  The best way to stain maple I found was to use a dye stain.  Dye stains have the ability to penetrate into the tight grain structure of the hard maple and leave you with a pretty nice color.   I used general finishes “dark brown” dye stain with the following steps:

• Sand up to 120 grit, then take a shop vac ( I know it sounds crazy) and vacuum all the dust up from the top of your table.  The shop vac pulls all the dust out of the pores and allows for better penetration.  Then take a tac clothe and wipe down your table top.  I used Minwax sanding sealer 1 to 1 ratio of sanding sealer to denatured alcohol.  This helps prevent blotchiness.  Please note that I tried prestain conditioner, dewaxed shellac and a few other products, but got significantly better results with the sanding sealer…..
• After letting the sanding sealer dry for 2-3 hours, I then proceeded to make 4 passes over the table with 220 grit sandpaper with my orbital sander. I proceeded this sanding with the shop vac and tac clothe wipe down of the entire table top.   I also did a slight wipe down with a clothe towel and denatured alcohol.  This helped raise the grain slightly/open up the pores of the wood.
• Finally I took a spray bottle with my stain and sprayed over the entire table top putting a nice even coat of stain.  This really worked well as my table was 7 foot wide. I quickly and gently wiped the excess stain off the table.

The results were really great.  The dye stain makes the figure of the wood “pop” and the sanding sealer keeps the color relatively even across your top.

For the top coat, I started out putting minwax high gloss poly.  I put several coats of this poly on the table, sanding with 400 grit sandpaper in between coats.  I really like this product.  I recommend putting it in the Fridge for 4-6 hours before you start working with it.  It will give you more time before the product sets up.  My final 2 coats I used behlen’s rock hard urethan satin varnish.  This product was truly rock hard, but once you put it on it sets up really fast…then it takes a long time to completely set up.  You had better work pretty fast using this stuff.  I used a roller to roll on all of my poly applications then evened it out with a really good paint brush. I built up layers of poly starting out with high gloss first, then switching to satin.  If you start out with satin and apply lots of coats, it can give a plastic type appearance to your finish that I do not like.

After 3 days of letting my final coat dry, I rubbed out the finish by taking 4 (0000) steel wool and a product called mohawk wool lube paste.  The steel wool evens out the finish and gives it an even sheen throughout the entire table top (see pictures).  The wool lube keeps you from burning through the finish with your steel wool.  Head over to Jon Peters Art & Home and he has videos on how to do this.

Hopefully this post helps some people. Let me know if you have questions.

Used the grandy sliding door console plans but modified due to space. Shortened it to a 5 foot length. Wanted rustic feeling so did a custom stain using a golden pecan mixed with golden mahogany. Being mindful of cost and used pine with bead board on the back.  Super pleased with the result! Thanks for the ability to use your plans!

I built this play fort and swing set based on Ana's Playhouse design. Today is my daughter's 3rd birthday and it is a present to her.
She has helped me the whole way through the project. It was a lot of fun building it with her.

For more pictures on my project see
http://flic.kr/ps/2spv6t

The deck is 12' x 8' and it is 5' off the ground to the top of the deck. The tube slide comes off of a platform that is 3' x 4' and 7' high off the ground to the top of the platform. I got the slides, swing arm and swing legs off a set from someone selling and old set through craig's list. Everything else i built myself.

I made these side tables (two matching ones) last year but never posted the pictures.  I will soon have plans available as well.

I made these from select Pine which is more expensive than the normal No2 Whiteboards.

They were made to suit the height of one of our sofas and finished in  Minwax Ebony and Minwax Satin Poly.

The hinges were from www.directfrommexico.com

Thanks for the easy tutorial...Made that last night with my two oldest kids (7 and 9) and we love it!