Big Kid Picnic Table
After I saw the bigger kid picnic table, I knew I HAD to make this ! I did change the measurements slightly, but I don't recall how now (I made this a year ago).
After I saw the bigger kid picnic table, I knew I HAD to make this ! I did change the measurements slightly, but I don't recall how now (I made this a year ago).
Farmhouse style table, 4 2x10 with 2X6 border. All Doweled and glued. Seems most plans are with square "breadboard" ends, i thought this style was a bit cleaner with no raw ends. 4X4 legs with 4X4 cross stretchers. Table ended up 4'X8' matching bench to follow.
You really need a dowel-jig, Kreg-jig, and bar clamps to do this project. You can also use a biscuit cutter instead of dowel jig, but I think it lines up better with dowels.
Close up shot shows swirl marks from 80 grit sandpaper used on an orbital sander... Even using 180 grit final sand it left them there, actually a nice distress look.
Plans were perfect. This was my first build.
Ana's wood shelving plans are easily adaptable for whatever requirements you may have.
Apart from some of the cutting done on a table saw I was able to do this project on my own and assemble.
I'm a beginner and managed it OK. It's not perfect but my husband was over the moon to finally have hanging space and shelving in our new house.
Would look great painted or stained.
I loved making this chair for my granddaughter! My pug is for size reference! Thank you Ana White!
Chris Dowling
This console features the style of the Apothecary Console and the functionality of the Console with DVD Storage Doors. I drew my own my plans by combining Ana's plans for the Apothecary Console and the Console with DVD Storage Doors. You can view my plans by visiting my blog at www.2crafty4myskirt.blogspot.com or by clicking the plan link below.
Sat, 03/17/2012 - 19:50
That's a really awesome cabinet. I love the look of the apothecary, and wouldn't have thought to design the doors like that for the added storage.
Sun, 03/18/2012 - 02:30
Really like this build. Just wanted to let you know there are a couple of mixed up letters in your blog address at the very beginning of the post...so it sends you to a different site.
Adore the cabinet! Thanks for sharing.
The moment I saw these plans I knew it would be the perfect Christmas gift for my daughter. We followed the plans fairly exactly, only using knobs instead of a notch in the drawer and adding some small furniture slides on the bottom. I had some left over fabric from the linens I sewed for my daughter's room and used these to create a mattress cover, pillow, and small quilt. She loves it. The drawer underneath is great for extra doll clothes, bottles, diapers, etc.
This bed was my biggest project so far and it was very time consuming. I love it though, and it looks great in my son's room!
We needed extra storage in the living room and I didn’t want to pay mega bucks for our cabinet guy to make something I thought I could do.
Its four ft tall, 3 ft long and 16 inches deep. I added 1x3’s to the sides and 1x4’s to the bottom.
I bought the Kreg shelf pin jig and it was super easy to use. Plan to use it again on a bigger project.
Next is a fireplace and TV surround.
Thanks Ana for the easy to follow plans!
In an effort to gain some space in our home, I decided to build up. The Bed is tall (not a problem for us) but not too tall. The added heigh allowed for an extra 2 LARGE drawers on each side and an additional storage space we refer to as the "cubby." This last space has a pop open latch insted of a drawer due to the side table above them. The cabinets at the foot of the bed have the same pop open latch system and house 4 large laundry bins.
The bed feels incredibly solid and I've already had several compliments from friends. One of the best came from a rather neat and organized contractor friend of ours who's home decor is wonderful. He asked where I bought it. My response: Lowes , in a pile of lumber :)
The time it took to build this was months, due to only working a night or two a week after my toddler went to bed. It could easily be week project.
Mon, 03/19/2012 - 17:33
This is wonderful. You created practical beauty. Great job!
Wed, 03/21/2012 - 14:35
I did...
But today is my first chance to start playing with sketchup. I'll see if I can put those together for you. In the meantime. Here's some numbers to look at. Remember, the bed is TALL, but my wife and I are both around 6 feet.
Each side cabinet is 60 inches wide by 20.5 deep by 22.5 tall (to the platform itself). The entire bed is 77.25 wide at the base, with trim.
Mon, 09/07/2015 - 10:30
First of all......
Amazing work!!! This is exactly what I am looking for to make for my daughters BDay. She has a small bedroom. I have never been afraid to take on a new project. Saying that I will be having the lumber company cut all the pieces for me. It will house all her clothes/shoes and hamper.
Please tell me that you have the dimensions for this platfrom bed.
Sat, 04/30/2016 - 22:05
Great job. Do you have the measurements for this bed. If so can you email them to me, [email protected]. Thanks
Wed, 04/18/2012 - 10:36
Thanks HK
Having the laundry hampers on all sides is quite doable. Email me if you want [email protected] and let me know what types of hampers you are thinking...how many... do you need doors... how tall...what materials you want to use and what size bed. I can help you with the design/modification.
Thu, 06/28/2012 - 14:05
I love the modifications you have made! I want my husband to make me this same bed that you have done. With our 3rd baby arriving in 2 months I really need the space that our clothes are currently occupying. Have you been able to make up plans for this bed? If not, do you have a list of measurements and supplies needed to make this?
Mon, 07/16/2012 - 21:12
Hey BJ,
This is the other BJ (or as Greta would term it, "chick BJ")! I was looking at this site, and saw a picture of the bed you made, with the caption "BJ D made this." So I clicked on it, and it showed a picture of you, and I was like, "Hey, I know that guy! That's the guy that married my best friend! And that's their daughter! Wow, small world!"
Anyway, I was thoroughly amused, and also, I really like the modifications you made on the bed. I'm totally stealing some of your ideas when we make our new bed frame!
-BJ
Fri, 04/18/2014 - 15:18
Hi, I emailed you, but just in case you don't still have that email or it doesn't go through to you. Did you ever make plans for your modifications? If so, I would love to see them. My email is [email protected]
Thank you!
My primitive mitre plastic template didn't allow me to get a 60 degree angle so I went with the very simply upright thingies instead! The vinegar, wire wool and tea oxidisation worked a treat and was far easier to apply than stain.
U-shaped breakfast nook custom built for client.
For the bones - I just laid the 2x4's out like studs all the way around. Odd corner in back R, 106 degrees, made for some fun mitreing on molding and plywood.
For the decorative finish, used single-piece paneling, not the wainscoting sheet-panels, to give a fuller look.
My daughter desperately needed a new loft bed for her small bedroom as she became a teenager. After looking a long time, I finally decided to take the plunge and make something custom after we couldn’t find a bed that met her needs (she’s VERY tall for her age). Thank you for posting the loft bed and bookshelf plans to this site, as they were great to work from and customize! This is my first woodworking project of any kind, and it came out great with these plans.
We followed the Loft Bed and Loft Bed Bookshelf plans pretty closely, but we did make some changes as we went...
First, we tweaked the guard rail design to make it removable by adding back vertical posts. This way, the front and back posts slide over the front rail and it no longer needs to be screwed in place. This is a nice tight grip for safety, but it’s much easier to make the bed by removing the guard rail and dealing with the mattress. If you do this, just make sure the back vertical posts are shorter than the front ones to make room for the cleats and slats on the inside of the rail! This also means the top of the rail is made with a 1x3 instead of the 1x2 in the instructions.
We also decided to use a vertical ladder design rather than an angled ladder. We did this for space considerations in the room; it’s a bit harder to get up the ladder, but not that much. This also helped avoid any weird angle cuts with my basic tools. We also made the ladder about 3” wider than the one called for in the plans.
One of my favorite features was adding a 3/4” plywood “ceiling” above the desk. We did this by moving the long side cleats upward by 3/4” of an inch in the plans, and using pocket holes roughly every 10 inches around the perimeter of the plywood. We used this to hide the bottom of the mattress and all the bedding from view when sitting at the desk. It also provides for LED strip lighting above the desk, which is installed by routing out a pathway in the board and installing the lights within an aluminum channel for heat dissipation and to allow installation of a plastic diffuser over the lights. The wiring for the lights lives in the ~1.5” gap between the board and the slats thanks to the 1 x 2 cleats.
In the shelving, we made the upper shelf in the wide bookcase adjustable with the help of a Kreg shelf pin jig. We also ordered a 3/8” tempered glass shelf for this area to let more of the LED light strip we installed in the top of this shelf shine down as well. Again, this was installed in a routed-out pathway that holds an aluminum channel, and the wiring goes up through both the bookcase top and the plywood bed “ceiling” panel to join into the power. We got the strip lights, aluminum channel with diffusers, power supply, and controller from Amazon.
To get power to the LED lights, I routed out a channel for 5-conductor wire in the middle board of a rear leg assembly. Before gluing up the leg, I coated the wire with silicone spray to avoid the glue adhering to it so I could slide the wire around as needed. With a little bit of chiseling, this wire is able to come out of the slide-in joints for the upper and lower wide rails on the back of the bed. On the top, these wires go into a splitter and then to the two sets of LED light strips. On the bottom, the wires to into the LED controller which is mounted to a scrap board along with the power supply that stands on end in the 3/4” gap between the back side wall of the bookshelf and the bottom bed rail.
We created a custom-designed file drawer unit as the pedestal for the desk opposite the wide bookshelf. This was modeled roughly after Ikea Alex drawers with three narrow drawers and one file drawer. The carcass is about 14 1/2” wide by 21 3/4” deep by 29 1/4” tall and made of 3/4” plywood. The drawer boxes are approximately 12” wide by 20” long made of 1/2” plywood with 3/4” plywood fronts. We used full-extension soft-close drawer slides and positioned the cabinet so they have nearly full extension behind the ladder. Four wooden dowels are used on the top corners to align and secure this end of the desk surface.
Speaking of the desk, it is a piece of 3/4” plywood approximately 24” deep by 64” long. One end rests on the file drawer cabinet, and the other end is flush with the middle shelf of the bookcase and attached using two 6” by 5” 14-gauge galvanized T-straps usually used in framing applications. These are screwed upwards into the bottom of the desk and shelf from below, and are holding up quite well. This avoids the need for desk legs by the bookshelf.
We then adapted the techniques used for the wide bookshelf to build a narrow bookcase (79” tall, 14 1/2” wide) out of two more 10-foot long 1x12 boards. This bookcase sits between the end of the bed and the corner of the room to finish out the look and provide more storage. The top, middle, and bottom shelves are fixed and there are a total of four adjustable shelves (two in the top half, two in the bottom half). We also cut a door and installed it using a pair of full-overlay euro hinges. With these dimensions, the tall bookcase is also capable of working with 11” x 11” x 11” storage cubes just like the wide bookshelf.
The finishing touch was to create a shelf that attaches to the guard rail and provides a place for my daughter’s alarm clock to sit and be within easy reach. This shelf is made around a piece of the scrap 3/4” plywood that is approximately 21” long and 9” deep. I used leftover 1x3 pine that I glued and nailed to the outside perimeter of the plywood flush with the bottom to hide the layers in the plywood while providing walls around the shelf. I also glued and screwed another 1x3 piece to the front of the plywood, this time flush with the top, as the first piece of a U-shaped grip to slide over the top of the guard rail. Another 1x3 scrap was then positioned, glued, and brad nailed to this front piece to finish the grip. I then cut a triangular piece of wood from a 1x6 to provide additional support under the shelf against one of the vertical pieces of the guard rail. This piece is held in place with counter-sunk screws that go through the top of the plywood shelf down into E-Z Lok threaded inserts in the top of the triangular wood support. The whole shelf assembly is only attached to the guard rail so that I can still easily remove the rail to change bedding on the mattress.
The whole project is constructed out of Home Depot select pine boards and birch plywood. Throughout construction, I used a 3/16” round-over bit in a router to eliminate sharp corners pretty much everywhere on the bed itself (legs, rails, ladder, etc.). I didn’t use this on the bookshelves, the file drawers, or the desk. Edge banding was used to hide any exposed plywood edges. I used 200-grit sanding discs and an orbital sander to sand the various pieces during construction and before finishing. The entire thing is finished with two or three coats of Minwax Polycrylic water-based polyurethane, sanding between coats, which gives this a nice smooth finish and lets the richness of the wood grain come through.
Hopefully the pictures I’ve posted can help understand the write-up on modifications to the project. I enjoyed building this a lot, and my daughter really loves what this did to her room to make it much more usable! That was worth all the effort and time right there.
Ana, thanks a million for the plans!!
I wanted my top to be a lift top, so I used 1x3's adding breadboard ends. I ordered the lifts from Amazon. I applied a single coat of stain and then sanded it down to give it a more rustic look before applying a satin poly coat.
A. Henry
This is my secend ever furniture build. I build it inspired by this storage bench from bed bath and beyond. http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/product.asp?SKU=132657
I am pretty happy with it!
I needed a dresser to match the two farmhouse sidetables I built for the room and this design fit the bill. I really had to take the time to figure out where to place the pocket holes. Finishing is my least favorite part of the process, but I'm glad to have really taken my time. This was a really challenging project and I'm so pleased with the end product. By far, my favorite build yet!
Built from the Wide Cabin Dresser w/ metal slides plans. I used soft-close ball bearing drawer slides instead of the European style ones suggested. The other departure from the plans: I liked the way the three separate boards in the open (bottom) row looked in the Pottery Barn model, hence used that instead of the flat board shown in the plans (and many of the other brag posts).
I don't know how people manage to get this done in a single digit number of hours. It took me a single digit number of hours just to get the drawers right and I would still say they're not 100% perfect. Having said this, I rated this project "intermediate" since I'm sure people with more wood-working experience than me (this was my first) would avoid some careless mistakes that I made and which required a few redo's here and there.
This is a beautiful console table built using the Narrow Console Table (Modern Farmhouse) plan. This is modified to be slightly wider, longer, and taller than the original plan. The dimensions are 68" long, 34" high, and 12.75" wide. The plan was very easy to follow and it was simple to adjust the measurements.
I used Varathane Dark Walnut Stain and once that was dry, I went over that lightly with Varathane Classic Gray stain. The final finish is Minwax Dark Wax and buffed.
More photos available on my facebook wood shop page at the link below.
Thu, 12/05/2019 - 12:06
Beautiful! I really like the finish you did on this table, thanks for sharing the details. I may need to try this myself.
Tue, 02/02/2021 - 19:09
Great color. I have never gone over color 1 with color 2 - I will now try it. Great look!
Tue, 02/02/2021 - 19:13
How do you wipe paint 2 over paint 1? Do you use a cotton cloth?
We just finished building this room and decided to finish it off with Ana's loft bed. It's mounted at height of 6 feet in order to accommodate our 18 year old.
Renae Gilford
We followed the plans, but did run into a couple snags. Because we were making two tables, we thought it might be easier to do all the cuts first, and then assemble both together. We agreed it was easiest in the end (so we weren't going back and forth to the saw), but the cut list called for one extra trim piece that the plans never used... lucky for us, we realized this before doing the cuts so just skipped it. The cut list left out one piece that the plans asked for at the end (for the life of me, I can't remember what it was), but we had quite a bit of extra lumber thanks to carefully thought out cuts so it wasn't a big deal.
We found that the plans really forced us to think out our approach along the way. We are true beginners, and we even ended up having to think about where we were sinking the screws and making sure to sand the pieces prior to assembling.
As far as our materials went, we purchased most of it at Home Depot. For the tops, we decided to use some scrap MDF that we had leftover from another project. Otherwise, we just used the cheapest lumber we could find, and pine for the 1x6 and 1x12's. Our Home Depot bill was $104, but we have a few pieces of lumber and pine that we didn't use, so plan to take them back. We already had the paint, and we bought the hardware at Lee Valley in Vancouver (BC), which was $24. We figure that the end price for each table is about $60.
For more details, check out my blog post on the project: http://www.andreakrisourchaos.blogspot.ca/2012/03/pinterest-challenge-b…
This was my first wood working project. I made this for my little sister for Christmas. It was a great starter project. I may be biased but I think it turned out pretty good.
Mon, 01/13/2014 - 07:31
Looks good! I especially like the black and white bedding. I'd do that for my own bedroom!