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Description

This modern coffee table looks like it could be designed today, or if painted with pink and turquoise – straight from the 80’s! It is very easy to build and has enough storage and style to complement your living room. This table can be made from one piece of 4 foot by 8 foot plywood, a few dowels, and a jig saw and drill.

Table:

Width 23″
Height 17.5″
Length 47″

Main Supplies:

Plywood - 1 Piece of 4′ by 8′ 3/4″ thick ~$20
Dowel Pins - Pack of 50 ~$3

Item Includes: The six page plan describes how to build the table in full detail with step by step instructions - even for those who have never worked with wood before!

Contents: Bill of materials, how to lay out the plywood, how to cut each part, drill the dowel holes, and how to assemble and finish the table. This is a plan to build the table, not the table itself nor any materials to build the table.


Description

This furniture plan allows you to build a chair and table set that would make any living room or patio more comfortable to enjoy. Hopefully Frank Lloyd Wright would be happy with all of the strong horizontal lines. This set can be made from three pieces of 4 foot by 8 foot plywood, a few dowels, a jig saw, and drill.

Table:

Width 36″
Height 16″
Length 36″

Chair:

Width 27 1/2″
Depth 25″
Height 26″

Main Supplies:

Plywood - 4′ by 8′ 3/4″ thick ~$20
Dowel Pins - Pack of 100 ~$6

Item Includes: The eleven page plan describes how to build the table and chairs in full detail with step by step instructions - even for those who have never worked with wood before!


Craftsman Style Coffee Table

This furniture plan can bring your living room back to the era of simple lines with a sophistication that will be the center of attention. This plan directs you in how to build this coffee table with one piece of plywood, a drill, and a jigsaw.

Table:

Width 36″
Height 16″
Length 36″

Main Supplies

Plywood - 1 Piece of 4′ by 8′ 3/4″ thick ~$20
Dowel Pins - Pack of 50 ~$3

Main Tools: Jig Saw, Drill




Plan Canvas - Dining Room Collection 1

This furniture plan allows you to build 6 dining room chairs and a dining room table from three pieces of plywood.

Why spend over $1000 on a dining room set when you can build your own for a tenth the price?

These are very simple furniture plans to follow, and will easily replace that card table and fold up chairs you’ve been using for the last year.

Chair Size:

Width 17 3/4″
Depth 24 1/4″
Height 31 3/4″

Table Size:

Width 40″
Length 70″
Height 29 1/2″

Main Supplies

Plywood - 3x 4′ by 8′ 3/4″ thick ~$70
Dowel Pins - Pack of 200 ~$10

Main Tools: Jig Saw, Drill



Building furniture plans, or doing any woodworking, means at some point you need to cut straight edges. My rule for choosing the right tool to cut with depends on the length and type of cut. If the cut is to be a straight cut for more than a few inches on an edge, the circular saw is the only way to go. It cuts far faster than a jigsaw, and doesn’t change angle very quick as you’re pushing it along. If the cut is curved or only a few inches, I’d go for the jigsaw because it is easy to maneuver and gives a clean edge. I would mention table saws here, but they are quite expensive for the occasional woodworker.

This post deals with cutting straight edges using a circular saw. In my experience, I would much rather cut really long pieces (like over 3 feet) with a circular saw rather than a table saw - its much easier to handle a small circular saw rather than a huge piece of board! The choice of buying a circular saw is outside the scope of this post, but many resources are available online.

The easiest way to cut straight is to clamp on a straight edge of some sort. I like to use extruded aluminum from some door framing (I found some in my basement), or use the machined edge of a piece of plywood, or even a piece of dimensioned lumber like a 2×4. The key of using anything is how straight the piece is, and where it is clamped to the workpiece. How straight the piece is depends on what you’re using. Where you clamp it is what the rest of this post will discuss.

For either a circular saw or a jigsaw, the critical measurement is the distance between the edge of the base plate and the end of the cut from the blade (see fig 1 and 2 below). This is the distance you need to clamp the inside edge of your straight guide. The fastest and most accurate way to measure this distance is to take a piece of scrap wood and cut it with the circular saw, and measuring where the edge of the base plate is to the edge of the cut. Take your time here.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Now using the same piece of scrap wood, try clamping on your guide, measured off a line you want to cut to. Take a cut and see how accurate you were. That’s it!

There are quite a few different guides on the market, but this way is far cheaper and great if you’re just getting into woodworking, or don’t have much coin. The main point to remember is that clamping wrongly will cost you in extra materials in the end.


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One hurdle that I always find myself in is how to make my recently completed piece of furniture look like it came from a fine furniture store. It has to have fine craftsmanship (tight joints, smooth surfaces, no scratches, etc.). The problem I always seem to have is trying to figure out how to finish it.

There are lots of ways to tackle this, and there are lots of sites devoted to this. The questions you need to ask:

1) What is this piece to be used for?
This becomes pretty important for things like material choice and sealants. If its an outside piece, lacquer or enamel with lots of sanding between coats is a good way to go.

2) What does it need to match to?
For the interior decorator in all of us. Dark stains, light stains, paint colors, fabric decorations. They all come into play. The best bet for stain is to take a piece of scrap wood from the piece you built and stain it to see how the wood will react and look. Some stains play really well with sheathing grade plywood. Some paints work great on MDF, but need lots of work to make them into a mirror finish.

3) How much time do you have?
If you’re keen on getting the piece completed and in use, rather than spending hours on sanding, you may want to invest in some fancy sanding tools, or just figure out a finish that will suffice (we’ll post about this in the future). Lots of the areas of a piece don’t need to be finished as finely as others - a table top needs to be as perfect as possible, but the backsides of the legs don’t need as much attention.

All in all, here are a couple of links that can help get you started:

Painting Furniture

Staining Furniture

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We’ve covered the series of how to design your own modern furniture plans, but we haven’t covered an area that really makes it your own.  Actually, there are two areas - upholstery and finishing.  Each one really deserves a ton of posts, but we’ll start slowly.

One of the best things about making something yours is making it yours all the way.  So let’s think on how this works.  Say you’ve already designed (hopefully built) a piece of furniture that you’re really keen on.  Now, how do you tie this into your room, or make your piece stand out?  Do you want to completely cover your project in fabric, or just add highlights like cushions?  Maybe cushions are even too much, and just a dab of really cool fabric will work.

Let’s first talk about the fabric.  What pattern?  A solid color?  Either way, there’s a ton of stuff out there at your local fabric shop, or better yet you can print your own fabric pattern.  This post was a great find - I recommend trying it out.  By making your own fabric, you can make it match other fabric you already have (or try some wallpaper patterns - good inspiration here!)  There are many places to buy fabric outright, such as IKEA, Distinctive Fabrics, and many more.  I’m still big on making your own.

Ok, now you have your fabric.  There’s lots of stuff you could make, but we’ll keep it to a few now and hit some more in the future.  One of the most versatile cushions is shown here.  Its nothing fancy, but take a step back.  Instead of it just being a seat, put some Velcro on the back of it and fasten it to the back of a chair or couch.  Make it any shape you want!  Like with the fabric, use some imagination, and you’ll have something really cool!  The other nice part is that since its held on with Velcro, you can take it off to clean it.

So you don’t want a cushion, but just some more color?  Frank LLoyd Wright had some pretty cool stuff.  In his utilitarian type work, he built much of the furniture for his houses from plywood.  The result was amazing, but he added a twist.  He draped runners over the backs of the chairs.  These runners tied in the furniture with the rest of the surroundings.  Great technique - if you have a picture of this, please send it my way - I’m working from memory here.

I’m very open to suggestions on this topic, so please fee free to add any comments!

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Build or Sell Furniture Plans

There are really many things you can do with your completed woodworking furniture plan:

Build the project
Sell the project
Share the project

Build

Since you’ve reviewed your plan many many times, this step should be very easy to implement.  The key to start building your own furniture is to plan ahead before you start cutting.  So go through your materials list again, purchase all the materials for the project, and now double check each piece.  The point here is to look for imperfections (such as knots in the plywood) that would be in the way in the final design.  Decide which side you want facing which direction (for a table top, you may want to not see the knots, so use the clear side for the top of the table).  Look at the grain and direction of the grain and how that plays into the project.  Now figure out if its best to stain or paint the pieces before cutting, after. 

Make sure you have what you need:  clamps, hammer, screwdriver, square, etc. There’s nothing worse than getting through a step at 3AM and realizing you can’t go any further because you don’t have enough clamps!  Do you need sawhorses set up?  Do you need to lay plastic out to keep your other furniture clean?  If you’re building out in the dorm parking lot is it going to rain?  When you paint and finish the project, is there anything you need to do (like move the piece to a dust free environment)?

Now build it!  You’ve been waiting for a long time!!

Sell

This section could be incredibly long, and I’m no expert on it.  I’m going to describe what I’ve done to make Plan Canvas’s online store, but take it as an example not the answer.  My first want of Plan Canvas was to make sure that it was as free from maintenance as possible, and as free as possible.  So I researched a ton of free online ecommerce shopping carts that supported downloadable products.  The search got to one final solution four years ago:  oscommerce.  This is a good solid cart, but has an incredibly steep learning curve.  I finally found a great book by Packt called “Building Online Stores with OsCommerce - Professional Edition”.  I could have saved hours to get the store up had I bought this book earlier.

I’m not going to go into detail here, but there are many steps (I’ll share them in a future post).  But the short list is:  Read the OsCommerce book, develop your site on your computer, get a web hosting package, add content.

Once your content is added, I’d suggest working on SEO - the Thirty Day Challenge is a great place for this!  There are plenty of internet marketing courses and books, but the Thirty Day Challenge is FREE and has really helped me understand some concepts I didn’t even know existed.

This was just the way I had attacked the problem.  There are many more solutions - please leave a comment if you have any suggestions!!!

Share

The nice thing about online furniture plans is that they are easily sent over email.  They can also be posted on a website, or even printed and mailed!  The one area I haven’t looked into yet is making them a torrent.  I don’t know much about these, but essentially its a Napster for all types of files - share among others directly.  I’m certainly not for pirating, but if you want to share your work for free to others, this would probably be a good start.

Summary

I really appreciate you going through this series - hopefully I’ve given some experience and knowledge to those who are looking for it.  I’m very open to suggestions, so please leave a comment!  I’m also hoping that you enjoyed some of the insight to Plan Canvas and the furniture plans there, so if you could be kind and let people know about the store, I would be very grateful!  So please take your time and enjoy this - hopefully it will become a great new hobby!

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Publish

The purpose of going through this step really depends on what you intend to do with your furniture plans.  If you’re planning on distributing them (since they do make a great gift), this will allow others to easily build furniture without having to try to interpret random drawings.  The quality of the plans also depends on what you’re intending on doing with them, and what your own standards are.

For the purpose of this post, we’ll go through the process that Plan Canvas goes through to publish a plan.  Here are the basic steps:

  1. Go over again the way the pieces are cut out
  2. Go over again on how the parts are going to be assembled
  3. Get overall dimensions of the project
  4. Make a materials list
  5. Figure out the best way to tell the story
  6. Add in any tips you may have


Step 1)  You’ve already done this (2 times I think?), but it never hurts to go over it again before actually cutting wood.  There’s always a Doh! if you cut wood wrong and end up wasting materials.

Step 2)  If you design something you can’t build, then it doesn’t do any good.  So make sure that it can be assembled once again (prototype if necessary).

Step 3)  If someone else is building this, they may want to see how it will fit with the room and the rest of their furniture.  Also, if you’ve made your piece larger or smaller than a standard piece, people should know.

Step 4)  This is really important since people rarely want to go to the store more than once, or they may need to budget out what to buy when.  List out the tools needed too - or alternative tools if there’s another way to do the same task with a different tool.  People always want to buy tools - their cool - but if you’re only going to use it once, it doesn’t make sense to buy it.

Step 5)  Think of your audience.  Will a master carpenter be building the piece, a hobby woodworker, or a college student who used a jig saw once in wood class back in junior high.  If its the latter, be sure to really explain each step.  Don’t assume that the user will know exactly what to do for each step.

Step 6)  This part is totally optional, but if you have anything to add from your own experience, add it in.  As people begin to work with building things, the more tips they have, the more comfortable they will be building projects in the future.

So as a very special example, the Plan Canvas Chair 00004 furniture plan will be free for you to use to understand where we are to this point.

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Rough Draft

Even if you’re doing a one-off piece of furniture, or making a small set, it is very good practice to put your drawing and method of assembly on paper.  The reasons are pretty basic:

1)  If you’re ever going to build another one, lots of little intricacies may be detailed here.
2)  If you’re going to share the plans, others need to know the details on how to make it.
3)  MOST IMPORTANT - Writing down the furniture plan makes sure that you’ve thought through the whole process of building your project.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just gone off to build something without thinking it through all the way.  This creates expensive waste - so take the time to think it through.

For furniture plans, its best to start from the beginning - the materials.  Make sure that the materials you’re choosing are available, that they are the right sizes, and that they are actually what you think they are (in other words, get your hands on some real stuff before you buy it!)

The next step in the process is to write down the list of materials.  How many fasteners do you need?  How much wood, paper, glue, metal, paint, stain, tools do you need?

Then, make sure your cut diagram (from the last post), makes sense for what you’re building.  If the cut diagram isn’t right, you’ll create more waste.

Now make sure that you can actually cut it!  For example, if you have some interior cuts (like the arms of Chair 00004), you’ll need not only a jig saw, but also a drill.  If there are beveled edges, make sure you have a circular saw or table saw that can cut at angles.

The next step involves your imagination.  You have all the pieces in front of you, now put them together.  Think about how you can get them together so that they are at the angles you need (like the chair legs to the seat), and that you can assemble them (the legs on the diagonal storage table are a good example - you cant put the bottom shelf in last because the legs are already attached to the table top and can’t bow out to accept the dowels from the bottom shelf).  This is a very important step and can really change your designs if you don’t think it through!!

Finally, think of what you would want to do to finish your project.  Does it make sense to sand all sides of each piece?  Can you save time by sanding only a couple of surfaces?  Should you paint all the pieces before putting them together?  Do you need to protect some of your surfaces from damage during assembly (since wood glue soaks into the grain, stain doesn’t come out uniform where glue has soaked in - tape off areas that glue may touch to keep your finish clean).

So to sum up, the main reason for putting the furniture plan down on paper is to make sure that you’ve mentally walked through each step of making the project happen AND to catch anything you may have missed so far.  Spending time here can help save a lot of time, frustration, and money when you actually start making sawdust fly!


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