Day Eight-sixty seven: a bench is born

If you've been playing the home version then you remember this project. We had a need for some way to store and conceal our bags inside the front door. You know, to keep things tidy. Well, the resulting box was nice, it was the right size, it was study...and it really didn't work for its intended purpose. It's color doesn't go with furniture around it, and it wasn't completely effective as a concealment device.

By now, you know where this story leads--we're making something new. After much scanning of The Internets for ideas, we settled on a small bench that we can put our bags under and that we can stain darker to match the other furniture in the room. 

So we started with a pile of wood. If we're going to stain or paint the wood then we've found poplar is a pretty good choice. It's not as soft as pine but just as easy to work with. It's also not nearly as hard as oak so that makes completed items lighter and reduces the chance of breaking nails and screws when attaching the parts.

The first step was to cut the legs. We picked up a technique from someone's website to cut them 5 degrees off 90 and with a 5-degree bevel (so 5 degrees off from side-to-side and from front-to-back). This makes the legs flare out from the bench and from each other, giving it more stability than if they are straight up and down. As you can see, it's possible to stand them up.

Before investing more time we wanted to see if this concept would work and whether this would address our needs. So we held everything together with tape, balanced things precariously, and field tested the pieces so far.

We liked what we saw and cut the rest of the pieces. This included a little 1-inch frame (second from the right) to keep everything in the right place. The long pieces are the seat of the bench and the ones in the middle are going across the front and back below the seat.

We decided to use the distressing technique that we've used for other pieces. Here's are some before and after photos. These nicks and dings will really show through once the stain hits them.

And here's a similar look at the legs.

The next step was to attach the four sides to the frame. We used some 1.25-inch screws because all of them will be hidden. On the outside, all you'll see are the small nails that are holding the cross piece on the legs (they're in the photo above).

Then with the legs on it's looking fairly benchy.

When we had it all together we realized that it might be wise to add some reinforcement to prevent any sort of wobble (and heck, someone may want to sit on it some day), so we put a cross beam along the back. Tres avant garde, n'est-ce pas?

Now we need to stain the whole thing before attaching the seat and we'll be done.