The Reclaimed Barnwood Co.

A few months ago we built a vanity for some clients of ours that went in their kids bathroom and now they're asking if we can build a two-step stool for in front of the vanity for their kids and I'll show you how we do that. The client basically wants sort of a two-step bench and look the drawing is going to suck but you get what I'm you smell what I'm stepping in here. So what they want oh geez that's way off. So what they want is a bench that's 13 and a half inches from front to back. I'm going to have the stair treads hang over a half inch all the way around so it'll hang over a half inch here we want it 13 and a half w If they also want it 13 and a half inches from side to side that's going to be the stair tread because it's hanging over half inch on each side it means from the outside of the two sides is going to be 13 inches. We're going to have two braces here and then some braces kind of in the back as well just to sort of hold the whole there may be one here too we'll sort of shoot from the So if our total distance side to side is 13 inches these are going to end up being an inch and a half t 13 and a half minus a half inch and a half inch is 12 and a half. 12 and a half minus three is nine and a half so these pieces inside here are going to be nine and a half inches. The stair treads are going to be 13 and a half inches wide as I already mentioned 13 and a half and it because it's 13 and a half from the front to the back we're going to divide that between the two stair treads so each one of these is going to be six and three quarters and finally they want a total height over here of 13 inches because t So we love reclaveswood we build a lot of stuff out of it. It looks awesome when it's done because of the character and the marks and there's no such thing or rarely is there ever such thing as square or flat or straight bonnet and so when in this first step we're going to be building the sides of this stool and I need something wide enough and I don't have planks that are quite 13 and a half inches wide and if I did they'd be cupped so we're going to be gluing three pieces together but as you can see the gaps that are between this and this two by four for example really nice piece of wood is all you know it's just not straight and so it's not going to glue up very nice and the strength of your furniture is all really a function of how well you've done your joinery and how tight the joints are how straight everything is so the first part of what we're always doing with our furniture is trying to figure out how to leave at least one side if not two or the exposed sides weathered natural and rustic looking but have all the joinery be tight and good so that we have a strong piece of wood so we've got two tools that we use to do that one you can use a track saw if that's what you've got at home or we've got a slide saw and what I'll do is I'll for this one I'm going to leave the two sides because this one's going to be exposed on the front this one will be exposed on the back I'm not that worried about it because you can't see it but I need to straighten out this edge and both edges in the two by four so you'll see me on the two by four I'm going to set it up on the saw I'm going to rip one side perfectly straight then I'll set my fence and I'll rip the other side and then I'll straighten out these two edges and we'll see how tight it will fit together afterwards so that we can get a good glue up so in some cases I would have run that through the joiner first to flatten out one side so when I made my cats I had nice 90s but this these work this wood was actually pretty good it wasn't straight but it wasn't warped so the bottom sides were pretty flat so now you can see when I've got these three I'm going to put them together they're quite a bit better the thickness is the board or a little different right now which is okay I don't mind dealing with that we'll put biscuits in when we go to glue up just to hold this middle one up a little higher and then I'll run the backside through the planer to get the backside nice and flat there are a few little tiny gaps that I can see and most of those are just from the saw blade on my saw so I've got like I predominantly use Makita tools or hand tools anyways and this little one comes in handy just to kind of square it yeah now we've got a really nice tight joint like I say this two by four is a little bit thinner but with the biscuits we're going to raise that up when we go to the glue up and the backside once we're all done I'll sand that down we'll flip it over and run it through the planer and get that backside just right okay so now it's time to get some glue on our fingers first thing I would do is mark out where we're going to put the biscuits these biscuits really all that they do is help to line up the you know where your boards are going to be and given that my boards are a little bit out of they're the same thickness these kind of come in handy to get everything lined up from the top and then like I said before I'll spend some time and plane that down so they're not very strong they're pretty brittle they don't really add a whole lot to the strength of your board they're just to help line it up mostly up and down and a little bit side to side and so I'm really only going to put two on each side and I'll just sort of mark where those are going to go try find this spot that I like the best okay you can see how that lifted it up so because I used the joiner from the top and went down there's a gap here not a gap but there's a difference between the boards but my surface is flat all the way across that's kind of the main advantage of the biscuit joiner in situations like this okay for my stair treads I've got the piece of wood that I want to use I'm gonna flatten out plane out the bottom side of it so it sits on the stool real nice and flat and then we'll leave and sand the top side I might skip plane it a tiny bit depending on how it kind of goes out okay now if you remember from my beautiful drawing I wanted the stair treads to be an inch and a half thick we're just over that right now you can see that the bottom side I've planed off so it's nice and flat I'm going to flip it over so it runs flat through the planer and it's got a little bit of a cup to it like this so the planer is going to take off the two edges I'm only going to take off just enough until it has at least what I'm going to guess is going to be these two sides which when I flip it back over to plane it down to thickness we'll hold it level so now this is giving me a flat enough surface that when I flip it over I can plane it flat without sacrificing more of the character like you can see some of the saw marks and the cracks and the checks and stuff like that so we're out of about we're about one and five eighths so I've got about an eighth add just underneath to come off okay again if you remember from the drawing we wanted our stair treads to be 13 and a half inches I've got both of them here by six and three quarters so I set the table saw to six and three quarters and I'm actually going to end up cutting off most of this In any event, it is assembled now. Here it is. Pretty simple two-step stool for our customers, for in front of their vanity, as I mentioned. Now we're going to go ahead and put some finish on it. For this, we use a n For t You can buy it at Home Depot. I like it for a n One is that it's pretty much sold everywhere and you can also grab it anywhere. And it works really good with the barnwood. Sometimes you spray it on, sometimes I brush it on. I guess it just kind of depends on how you're feeling and what you've got, whether you've got a sprayer or don't have a sprayer, but you certainly can brush it on. Every piece of barnwood is a little different. It's a little t Some of them aren't quite as much. So I do With try to get a pretty even coverage over the entire t I'll let that dry and then I'll sand it and then I'll come back and put another layer or two on depending on how it's looking. Okay. Okay.