Built Myself a Footstool

2015-01-26 22:09 - Making

My final plans, based on the material available.

This weekend I made myself a footstool. I started from these plans I found online, though I couldn't find any attribution for them. I especially like that it looks nice enough, but leaves the feet right out by the outer edge, making it quite sturdy. Then I customized based on the material available. There was a nice wide board in my Mom's scrap pile, but it was covered in some old blotchy white paint. More on that later.

The legs The legs cut out. Traced a bucket for the cutout on the legs. Cut the legs

I started by marking out the three pieces. The top was just a rectangle, and the two legs each were trapezoids. With them marked out correctly they were both cut on the table saw. One of them had a bit of a flaw, but that area was soon to come out. I marked the round cutout with a bucket, and then cut it out with a jigsaw.

The top has rounded corners, a convenient bottle was traced for the radius. All three pieces after routing a roundover on all the outer edges. It took some careful planning to get the angles for the joint correct. When I cut them by hand they fit great!

The next step was a lot of sanding to strip the paint off. It didn't all come off: the knots grabbed the paint tight, and some low spots had extra paint that sanding couldn't remove. Close enough, and much better, though. I don't plan for it to be very visible under my desk. The corners of the top were rounded off with the jigsaw, a handy can on the workbench was a nice size to trace. With that done they all got a pass on the router for a round over of the outer edges.

Then I had to cut the joining slots in the legs. At just the right angle. After some sketching and practice aligning scrap pieces, I realized that the cuts had to be complementary parallelograms. And if I crossed the opposite corners of those, I get the center point, which should line up with the center point of the leg pieces. Easy peasy! I had to cut those slots by hand so they came out just a tad rough, but worked just great after a little filing to clean up the edges.

Laying out the legs, on the top upside down. No fasteners, just glue, clamped overnight. The final product.

With the legs lined up they were laid out to be even on the top, upside down. Then I used glue, no nails, no screws, and clamped it overnight. Voila! Some spots of paint remain, but it's going to live under my desk so that's not a big deal. It turned out almost exactly as I planned, but a bit too tall perhaps. I basically just used the board available as it was, but I probably should have cut it down by an inch or so. Either way it serves its purpose well enough!

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