Community Brag Posts

I saw someone's brag where she used this plan for shoe storage. I thought it was a great idea. It sure lets me clean the floor better, just roll it out of the way, clean, roll back. It is so much better than the shoe rack that occupied the space before with such piles of shoes that it was arduous to clean the floor at all. Next month I will take care of the second shoe rack for my own shoes.

It was so simple, I loved making them. Grandpa and I had fun. The best part, you can make them quick because the don't have to be perfect. And Grandpa's nail gun made quick work of all the attached boards. All boards were also glued and sanded.

Ana your site gave me the confidence to solve my own furniture problems with custom solutions. Thanks, I can't wait for my next project.

We recently moved from a 530 sq ft rental house to a 1700 sq ft rental house. The one kitchen table that we had in the little place was needed in our library/craft/homeschool room so I needed something knew for the kitchen. My 8 year old daughter helped a lot (she loves using the Kreig Jig). 

I love how this (my second wood working project ever!) came out. 

Thanks for making it so easy to create beautiful and custom furniture for me and my family! 

I made these nightstands with reclaimed siding and fir flooring, and scrap wood from a remodel they will ultimately furnish. I found the matching knobs for $1 each at a building materials salvage yard.

Putting this table together was a lot of fun! We knocked off about two feet from the plan so that it fit in our modest dining area. Many of my saw blades were replaced at some point during this project in favor of sharper and cleaner-cutting replacements, so we spent quite a lot making sure we didn't end up with a giant splinter of a table. You can see from one of the photos how poorly I chose some of the wood (the 2x2 is like a cork screw), so I had to replace a few pieces. Still, I think I could have replaced all of those tools altogether and still spent less than this table would have cost at the store.

Something I learned during finishing: I knew beforehand that wood glue didn't stain, but I didn't realize that even the residue of wiped-up glue will keep the wood from taking stain. When the matching bench is made later on I'll be sure to sand all of the places where glue might be hiding, invisible. The stain color generally wasn't quite what we imagined and the legs seem to have taken it differently than the top, but when the word "Farmhouse" appears in the table style, you can chalk all of those imperfections up to its "rustic" style. For that I am grateful.

The poly dried a bit rough, but a fine sanding sponge smoothed it out and also gave it a little bit of that greywashed RH look. Win-win. We wound up putting "Flor" tiles underneath the table to give it some contrast since it ended up resembling our floor color a bit too closely. Now we actually have a dining area, instead of just a table.

It took about a week and a day (I started Saturday morning and we finished it the following Saturday night). Fortunately our ten-month-old can sleep through just about anything. I'm glad it's done now and we can enjoy it!

So glad these plans were posted so that I could build my own outdoor sectional.  I built two armless and two corner/end pieces.  I used cedar with American Walnut stain and clear/satin spar urethane.  I purchased the cushions online.  They only had 24x24"; so for the back cushions, I used a seam ripper to open the cushion, cut the foam and extra fabric, and re-sew.

Easy build and flexible to modify size 

It was a race building and finishing the console before my daughter started crawling, but just as she learned to wander around, we were able to hide all of our tv/dvd/receiver cords within this console. Drilled holes in the back and tucked the power strip and cords in a plastic box inside the cabinet doors.

Used a jigsaw for the first time, which was fun as the saw created the neat designs on the feet at the bottom.

For the finish, we wanted a color that could pull off a distressed/modern shabby chic while matching the stained class windows in the house that we just bought.

This was my first time creating doors, which did not run smoothly, but ended up somehow working.

here is my version

Thank you for the plans! I love the way my headboard came out! I couldn't figure out how to cut the on piece of moulding to get the angles to work, but I think I resolved the issue nicely with the blocks for it to die into.

This was a fun project that my Dad and I had the opportunity to work on together. We were able to locate an old barn that and recently been blown over (farmer gladly told us to take whatever we wanted). We salvaged the wood, hit it with a little sand paper that provided the true rustic farm house look. With some modifications and a biscuit joiner we were able to fit this together. All in all I think I spent a total of $6 on the lag blots for the legs. 

Made in 2014 from the playhouse bed plans with the storage stairs as well.

I made this out of hard to find 2" reclaimed rough sawn beams. They are from a building in the Washington DC area that was torn down.

I made a couple of decorations from my scrap wood.   On the snowflake, I had some extra parts of 1x2s laying around so sized this down to 20" and used those.  The tree is just a bunch of different types of wood I had left over.  This was really fun to do. 

It took me a little over a day as I had to paint and wait for it to dry before I could assemble.

Thank you for the ideas and plans.

So, after having built the rustic console and rustic end table, I was staring at the blank space in my room and the stack of books and decided that I could fix two problems with just a slight adjustment of the console plans.  Basically the structure is exactly the same for the top, "legs" and shelves, but then instead of running 2" x 2" trim, I did 1" x 2" and 2" x 4" at the base (mostly to keep the dust bunnies as bay).  The other significant difference is the ends, which I paneled and trimmed out rather than doing the open "X".  And then ran tongue and groove paneling along the back to finish it out.

As with my other rustic builds, I left off the metal trim (again, for now at least) and distressed the top and face with a rotary wire brush.  The texture on the top of this one turned out really wonderful.  I hate to even put anything on top to hide all that grain.  Price was a little more too, mainly for the extra 1" x 12" x 6' and the pack of tongue and groove panel boards.

Built this play kitchen to go in Liv's new Playhouse, also courtesy of Ana's plans. It's about 1" too wide to sit on the floor so we raised it up on a plank so it rests on the studs. A co-worker told me I can get replacement knobs for the stove at Sears and plan to make a trip there on my next break. The faucet is a real one my mother found in her basement from their bathroom redo. She loves it! We "bake" cupcakes from the sandbox in her new house everytime we're outdoors. She did, however, request a microwave after we'd finished the whole thing! This spring I hope to make one. I see that Pottery Barn Kids sells them for over $50!! You know that's crazy if you've come across Ana's website :)

Looking for rustic outdoor table ideas, I came across Ana's website and the Providence Table and benches. When I saw it, I knew this was what we were after. After some more browsing I came across the 4x4 truss beam table and decided to rather go with the chunkier table. Although I’ve done a few woodwork projects, this was the most ambitious to date, especially considering that I only have a few hand held tools.

We live in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa - we work in metric, so all dimensions needed to be converted. Also, our locally available wood sizes are different to timber sizing in the States, i.e. we don't have 4x4 (100mm x 100mm) or 2x4 (50mm x 100mm) available, so it was a bit of a challenge to decide what to go for. In the end I decided to use 75mm x 50mm rough cut treated construction pine. It was cheaper, and I could end up with a REALLY Chunky table if I glued 4 pieces together! In order to do this, I need to amend the plans as if it was made from 6x4 beams.

So I started the process of cutting the 75mm x 50mm timber to rough sizes, gluing the pieces together, sanding the joints, filling the gaps with glue/ sawdust mixture and re- sanding for each member of the table! I took my time with this and did a bit each day after work. It was interesting watching YouTube vids on this build - the guy starts with perfect 4x4 timber pieces, cut them and assemble. For me just to get to the starting point took quite some effort, but I knew I would be very happy with the more chunky look.

Other challenges I did not fully appreciate when deciding on the REALLY Chunky size, was the cutting of these thick pieces of timber using hand held tools and how to join them!! You don’t get very long small drill bits for pilot holes, so ended up using self-drilling screws. Unfortunately the longest length I could find was 120mm (8.66inch) - so I had to counter sink them really deep into the timber - this was quite tricky!

Other things I did were to lower the original design table height as recommended by other builders on this site so I made the table height 750mm (29.5inch). It worked out very well for small children as well for adults (I'm 6ft2). Table length I made 2.4m (approx 8ft). For the table top I used 220mm x 50mm (8.66 x 2 inch) timber, once again due to the restrictions of locally available sizes. I also change the spacing between the legs in order to fit the benches under the table (1600mm opening to fit the 1550mm benches).

For the benches, I once again had to decide what timber sizing to use. I wasn't keen to go through the process of forming 6x4's for each bench member for 2 benches and also felt that it would look just too chunky for the short bench legs. So the design ended up being a hybrid between the providence bench- and the chunkier 4x4 bench design, using 2 pieces of 75mm x 50mm to create 100mm x 75mm (4 x 3.5inch) legs.

Other changes made to the bench design was to make the bench height 450mm (17.7inch), amend the overhangs of the seat, and change the overall length to be able to slide the bench in under the table.

The altered height of the table and benches really worked out well and we sit very comfortably at that table.

We used chalk paint for the finish, but as you can see, we're still deciding on colour choices and final look of the top.