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!
If a piece really grabs you, try to find who designed it or built it. In many cases, the original designer also produced other items with the same feel. These are great leads to follow, even if they are the greats like Wright or Eames.
