Community Brag Posts

After moving from Hawaii to Maryland, I was finally able to make good on my promise to make a new bed for Suzie. I made very few minor modifications to the plans as posted.

I made these ledges with pine and white wood, 4' long. I wish I had used pocket hole screws to connect them, but instead I just counter-sank the screw holes and butt jointed the boards with wood screws. I filled the screw holes with 5/16" wood plugs and sanded them down flat. Then I sanded, stained, varnished, and sanded again.

Please see my process below on my blog.

Thanks, Ana!

First Project...Used pine for the base and oak for the top to match home counter top.

The bed is a mixutre of the loft bed plan and the farmhouse loft bed plan with some modifications of my own thrown in.  I liked the headboard look of the farmhouse loft bed and incorporated it into the plan.  I also made the side rails out of 1x10's to make it more beefy looking and I think it works better.  The supports for the mattress are made out of 3/4" bookshelves, cut down to fit as it added more support than 1/2's.  The desk is based off the loft bed desk plan, but I made the top piece out of 3/4" MDF. I think it makes a nicer look.  I added 1x2's to the face of the bookcases and desk top to finish it off and make everything look more finished.

I also added a programmable, remote controlled, RBG LED lighting system under the bed.  My daughter can go from dance party to mood lighting depending on the situation.  This bed will deliver.

I also modeled everything in 3D CAD using Solid Edge.  This was a very helpful tool to get all the measurements correct as well as incorporating 3 different deisigns blended with my own.

We fell in love with this daybed plan right out of the gate but had to modify the plan somewhat due to the rain and crazy weather we are experiencing during the warmer seasons. Rather than use a twin mattress we purchased the largest size outdoor cushion we could. We covered it in Dacron wrap and used an olefin material for the huge cover which maxed out at 54x96. It was one heck of a big zipper to sew! The material is mould and mildew resistant and has proven to be really resilient and I vacuum to keep it clean. It feels luxurious to slide into. We added a polycarbonate roof with a 6% slant, that projects 8-10 inches from the front and back, for rain and snow and because it sits under a crabapple tree which provides shade but will drop small projectiles on your head. We wanted to be able to manage the snow efficiently if we received a heavy fall. We hung the curtains using a chain link fence rail and are able to spend afternoons resting catching the breeze and reading so comfortably. It is situated in a southwest exposure so they are necessary to provide a little protection. The curtains are closed and secured with clamps for heavy rainfalls and so far so good! Everything has stayed dry despite high winds.
 

As you can see from the little ramp, we have four buddies that love the bed as much as we do! It is our little retreat. We love our magic space and the relaxation we experience the minute we slide in. Thanks for such great plans. It was so straightforward that modifications were simple and easy!

I love this antique workbench console b/c it's the perfect mix between my desire for beautiful and my husband's desire for rustic hunting lodge. (Southern girl meets Minnesota hunter - LOL). It's just a gorgeous antique look, but for far less money. I have haven't put the towel bar on the front yet b/c I keep forgetting to buy it (it's amazing how shopping with toddlers can do that to you). And in my area, mounted bottle openers are only available online, so we need to order one. I used standard stud grade 2x4's for the console, and 1x6's for the planked backing of the hutch. I also dropped the bottom shelf to the natural resting place at the bottom of the legs/top of the feet. It was so much easier for me that way as a beginner, and I really think it still looks great. This was my first Kreg Jig project - and it was so so easy. Ana is totally telling you the truth when she says it's completely worth the money to buy one. My father-in-law is a very well seasoned carpenter and wanted one after he saw some of the furniture I've built with it as a beginner! (We bought him one, of course, b/c he's awesome.)

My neighbor loaned me a shop vac and a palm sander to refinish a table, and I fell down a rabbit hole. This is the Brooke Mid-century Console Table from this site. I need to touch up paint the front, and it's not perfect, but this was my first woodworking project. I think the hardest part was wrestling with the drawer slides; I think I had to remount them three or four times. There was plenty of swearing involved with the Euro hinge as well.

I took a "Woodworking: Your Own Projects" class at the local community college, but this project was almost entirely self-taught (although I had plenty of adult supervision while learning to use the saws.)

I bought most of the materials from Building Materials Resources, a local reclaimed building supply store. And then took about a million trips to the local big box home supply stores for "just one more thing."

I had originally stained the project with Minwax Sedona Red and put some wipe-on oil-based poly on it, but the drawer fronts came out blotchy because I had used wood putty over the brad holes, so I painted those and the door brown ("Polished Mahogany" SW2838.) Then the edgebanding that I had applied on the front and stained was peeling off and looking terrible, and I didn't want to redo it.

I gave up and scuff-sanded the whole thing and painted the rest of it blue ("Still Water" SW6223.) I then applied several coats of semi-gloss spray water-based polyurethane, sanding lightly inbetween coats. I finished it off with a coat of Howards Feed N Wax and 0000 steel wool.

One tip that I have is that you can buy enormous (quart sized!) paint samples at Sherwin Williams for about $5 apiece. I used a paint sample for the brown portions, and a "real" quart of paint for the blue portion, and I cannot tell the difference in quality.

Skills learned:
Drilling pilot holes (believe it or not)
How to use the Kreg jig
How to use a miter saw
How to use a circular saw
How to use a table saw
Applying edgebanding
Applying wood filler
Staining
Building drawer boxes
Installing drawer pulls
Installing drawer slides
Installing euro-hinges (and how to use a Forstner bit)
How to use a brad nailer
How to attach table legs
Probably some other stuff that I forgot

Our rabbit lives in a 2'x6' Xpen cage set up in my tiny sewing room. As cute and fluffy as he is, I couldn't help but see his space as intruding on some valuable sewing real estate. I had to do all my fabric cutting on the kitchen table and lug everything back upstairs to the sewing room when it was time to eat. Laying out patterns had to occur on the floor. I thought it would be quite nice to have a table in the rabbit's corner ... :) I've used 2 of Ana's plans for bookshelves years ago and so I KNEW I could come up with a simple table plan and execute it. It took me about 10 minutes to formulate my plan and about 4 days to build it. :) The top is removable so we can easily move the table ... otherwise it would be a real back-breaker! 

Note: The estimated cost is $100, but that's because I had supplies other than wood to buy. Screws, glue, stain, etc. I'd say it was $60 in lumber.

Ana, I want to say how inspirational you have been to me over some years. I think my first project found on your website was a chicken coop. More recently I have built the large garage workbench system with 2 rollout workbench/storage units (still in progress). In the past few weeks I have built the Adirondack chairs. The Adirondack chairs spurred me to continue building a “park like” setting in my small backyard. This includes a park bench (to match the Adirondack chairs), a park style grill, and a water fall. The waterfall is fairly simple (now that I have done it once - ha).

This is the first Ana White plan I've used and my first project with a Kreg Jig. It was so easy! I used 6' long lumber. This ledge is 4' long and I have a 2' ledge in the living room.

I started this project without a cutting table or any kind of shop set up. I used a burnt out tree as my makeshift cutting table. With only hand tools I used Ana Whites blueprints from her website to do this whole table, the directions were very easy to
follow and very helpful.

July 2016: We recently moved and the corner cupboard we purchased several years was too tall for the new house. I needed a new storage solution for our kid's arts & crafts, games, and funny business materials. Of course, Ana and her corner cupboard saved the day! Thank you! The kids have a great place to store their business and mom and dad can finally recycle all of the cardboard boxes stacked dangerously in the corner. 

Our corner cupboard was adapted from Ana's Corner Cupboard plan. The height was increased to 84", adjusted the dimensions for increase heights including the shelf spacing, doors on top and bottom to hide messes, used 1x12 for spine of the cupboard and shelves.

Thank you Ana! 

This media center was my hubby and I's very first project! It was definitely a learning experience and its definitely not perfect, but we love it! We love how much it looks like the pottery barn version and that WE MADE IT!!!

This project took us quite some time to complete..... and its still not 100% done as we still need hardware for the 2 outermost doors but are having a hard time finding ones similar to the pottery barn ones that aren’t going to cost us a fortune..... My hubby and I put this together piece by piece as we had time (which seemed to be few and far between). If you had uninterrupted time to work on this , one could probably start and finish it in a weekend. But because of lack of uninterrupted time and the learning curve of this being our first project it took us months to finish.

We got the TV base (the bottom middle piece) done first and we were so excited about it that before attempting the rest of the project, we painted it and set it up in the living room :) We were so excited to get the rest of the media center made but my hubby got busy with work and was unable to help me. I got antsy, so antsy in fact that finished the rest of the project COMPLETELY on my own!! And I am SO PROUD OF IT!!! I made and painted the rest of the media center except for the doors because i (not sure why) was completely intimidated by the doors so I procrastinated making them, so the media center sat in the living room for a month or 2 without doors or the adjustable shelves on the towers lol. Last week I finally got up the courage to make the doors and they (to my surprise!) really weren’t that bad!! I painted them and the adjustable shelves and finished assembling the media center. Its now finished and decorated except for some of the door hardware!!! SO EXCITED!!!

Since this was our first project we hadn’t bought a Kreg Jig jet (we have since bought one) and I HIGHLY recommend getting yourself one. It would have made this project so much easier.

We made this a bit taller then the plan. But everything worked out well. It was our first project. I would NOT recommend this as a first project. Also, wipe the stain off quickly. We let it sit way too long and it came out very dark. It took us a long time to build because we both work. And, Home Depot didn't cut miters so we had to get a neighbor to do it.... fyi

I love it though.