Community Brag Posts

This was the first project my husband and I completed from one of Ana's plans. I'd wanted a pair of Adirondack chairs for our yard, and convinced my husband that we could build them ourselves. Once he was on board, he suggested we build a pair for our neighbors as a surprise and leave them in their yard while they were out of town. We had a blast and learned a lot. We've had tons of compliments on the two sets of chairs, and during our last neighborhood garage sale, we had many offers to buy them (but we're not selling!). Thanks, Ana!

This was a pretty simple build. I got the soft close hinges at Lee Valley for only $12.00 CAD. Stained the dark areas with three coats of Minwax Ebony stain and then finished with three coats of Varathane Satin. The only thing I would change in the next one is to secure the front and back board with pocket screws in a couple of locations to keep them straight.

This plan had comments about the 1x12 being a little short. 

I used 1x4 for the top and stained with dark walnut danish oil

This is my first build ever...except for a rad cd rack I built in 8th grade shop class.  My husband and I team-worked it as a date in his dad's garage. 

So it all started when my amazingly crafty friend Lee built a toy kitchen for her kids.  I was so impressed and started looking up other people's diy kitchens.  So then I was searching for something totally different and saw the play kitchen on Ana's website (love it), and I got totally addicted and decided I was going to build a dining room table, because we have been using a hand-me-down brown card table and chairs from the 70's since we got married.  (How's that for a run-on sentence?)  I wasn't sure if my husband would take me very seriously, but after I showed him this website, I started noticing him on it all the time.  He's more addicted than I am! 

Fast forward some time and we decided to start with the spa bench as a warm-up.  Once we are in a house with our own garage (God willing in the next few months), we plan on tackling the Farmhouse Table.  Anyway, when we took the kids to Gma and Gpa's, my father-in-law got really excited that there were going to be carpenters in the family, and he took us out to the garage to show us all his tools that we could use. 

We had to buy all of the wood, screws, sand paper, stain, polyurethane, and a paint brush since it was our first project, so it ended up costing about $85.  At least now we have a lot of supplies left over for our future projects!  We had Home Depot make the cuts for us so that we could fit the wood in our car.  We used 1x4s instead of 1x3s because we didn't know that 1x3s were furring strips and not in the same place, but now we know.  :)  We also bought one warped board, which was a total pain.  Don't do that. 

This is probably a weekend project if you count the staining and finisher.  The actual building part only took us three or four hours (please don't laugh at us if that's painfully slow), but we actually took about two weeks to finish it because we have rain, no garage, and three kids under 19 months.  And we weren't really in a hurry.  Anyway, it was fun.  We like to build.  Thanks, Ana, for inspiring us and for making it doable for so many people!  We think you're neat.

This is my daughters new bed. We modified the plans to fit what we wanted. I added drawers to the stairs. Then put shelves behind the stairs. Added doors so we can hide the shelves. We used rope lights inside to add light with her own light switch.

PS Don't mind the date on the pictures. Forgot to change the date.

Project #2 in the bag! I haven't personalized because I am still considering making another at 36" wide to better fit her room and giving this one away. Very pleased with how it turned out! Still learning!

I absolutely love the way these turned out! I drew up an example in Sketch-up using Ana's plans for the Simple Nightstand as a starting point.