Built Myself a Footstool
2015-01-26 22:09 - Making
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.
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 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.
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!
