Kitchen Bench - a Woodworking Beginner Project

I needed a kitchen bench, so I build one. Follow along…

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The standard three disclaimers of the newbie, non-pro Instructables writer:

This is my first Instructable, so bear with me and please comment your feedback and suggestions for improvement.

The pictures arent as good as i would have liked them to be. You can guess it: small dark workshop, only a phone camera, no tripod. Already three things to do better next time ;)

I am not a native english speaker, so please excuse any mistakes.

Like the most of us i don't have a fancy workshop nor fancy tools. I tried to get the bench build with what i had or rather not spending a lot of money on resources or tools.

Tools:

• Handsaw
  > rather rough one, for fast cross-cutting and ripping the wood (sawing lengthwise)
• fine Handsaw
• Jig Saw
  > not really necesssary, could have easily done it without
• Circular Saw
  > not mine, just rented it from the home center for one afternoon for fast rip-cutting
• Handplane
  > grandpa's trusty old wooden plane, it was the star of the show, you'll see it in the pictures.
• Cordless screwdriver/ drill
  > one fancy thing i bought for this and hopefully many projects to come was a good battery powered drill
• pocket-hole jig
• a hammer
• one mid-sized chisel
• a rasp and sandpaper
• a square, pencil and something suitable as a marking knife (simple utility knife will suffice)

Materials:

• wood: everything cut from 4 pieces about 2000 x 500 x 25 mm
  > thats like 2,6 x 0,8 x 0,006 baseball bats
  > i didnt buy that it was just 4 discarded cabinet doors i picked up from the roadside
  > i think it is spruce or pine, definitely quite soft
• wooden dowel - a 1m piece of 10mm diameter dowel rod was enough
• wood screws: 4x40mm (40) ; 4x30mm (20)
• wood glue
• a couple of band aids
  > depending on your woodworking skills and clumsiness; be safe and take your time :)

I looked at a couple of pictures from simple bench constructions online, measured the kitchen chairs i have for height reference and made a rough plan in my head. I drew out the plan for the bench in 1:1 scale on a piece of drafting paper and started working. The CAD plans below i just made afterwards for this Instructable, so it would be easier to understand what i am talking about, but it’s not necessary to plan in a CAD program. Actually i found it really cool to just sketch a little bit, take some measurements and make a simple drawing in actual size (tip: on a piece of paper you can also just lay down your chair or other reference on top of the drawing and draw around or make comparisons). I made a very simplified pdf-plan of my bench, see download option below.

Basically, the bench is made up of two mirrored side parts, let’s call them leg assembly. They are in turn made up of the back leg, a small connector (see pictures in red), a longer connector (orange) and a short front leg. The back leg will also hold the back rest of the bench. The two leg assemblies are connected with two long stretchers (in yellow; is stretcher the right term here?). The seat board rests on the leg assemblies and the top sides of the stretchers. The back rest is screwed to the back legs. And that’s it, a really basic construction.

As it was my first real furniture project, I did not want to use traditional joinery but also not have screws visible on the bench. That led me to the solution of pocket-hole connections. You see them used a lot by the YouTube Woodworking community and I think they are a clever invention. I didn’t go for the expensive kreg pocket-hole jig (which seems like the nice version) but a simple jig you can clamp on to your boards (the ‘wolfcraft undercover jig’ by wolfcraft, a german company).

To begin this project, I set up my little ‘workshop’ in my tiny basement storage room. To get into the woodworking groove without having to start with the main project straight away, I made two confidence projects. A 5-minute project: a little key chain thingy for the ‘now renamed from storage to workshop’-room. Also, a 3-hour project: a wooden mallet. I found this perfect to get going and also very satisfactory to make my own tool.

I didnt start documenting the build with pictures from the very beginning, but it's not too complicated. I made cardboard templates for the leg parts, traced the template shapes onto the wood and cut them out. For the legs two identical boards where glued together to get the necessary thickness.

After the glue up I had to plane the two pieces flush, better alignment during glue up would have made this step a little easier. The convex side of the back leg was easy to plane, the concave one not for obvious reasons (a hand plane with a flat sole cannot reach into inside curves). Since I don’t have a spokeshave or something similar I trimmed that part with the rasp and sandpaper.

I also cleaned up the flat face sides of the legs to get the old finish off and clean the surface. That was a lot of fun since it was my first time really using a hand plane and creating those lovely wood curls.

I trimmed the top end of the leg with the fine handsaw. I wanted to see if I could plane endgrain with my plane – I could not… I broke off a corner but just glued it back in place, barely visible after all.

The other parts for the legs are much simpler than the back leg and are just cut from two 80mm wide boards. I carefully marked the angles with cardboard templates, marked them with a knife all around the board to guide the saw and minimize tear-out and cut them with the fine handsaw. This worked well.

The front legs are doubled up in thickness as well. I glued and screwed the two halves together. Screwing instead of clamping was a good option here, because it helps aligning the parts and I only have two small clamps that I also needed to continue cutting out more stuff. Again, I planed the legs flush once the glue was dried.

Cut out the small and long connector board in the same way. These don't get doubled in thinckness because they 'meet' in the assembly to make a strong connection.

For the assembly I checked if the parts were coming together as planned by laying them onto my templates. Then I drilled the pocket holes into the small connector piece and screwed that to the back and front leg. The longer connector piece gets glued and screwed to the sub assembly and ties everything together nicely. The second leg assembly is the same but mirrored, so there is a designated left and right leg assembly (compare cad drawing above).

Now I could check if this will all make up something useable in the end and make a test chair/ bench by putting a small board on the two legs, clamping it down and have a seat. No catastrophe yet.

I needed to join two 23cm wide boards to make up the seat board. This is not very complex in theory, but because I don’t have a jointer plane and didn’t cut the boards with enough precision when I had the circular saw this was a very tedious step. I had to join the boards edges with my small handplane which took me about 3 hours to do because, well that’s not really a small handplane’s job. I had to set the boards edge to edge every couple of plane strokes to check where I needed to remove material to get a somewhat tight joint.This doesnt create two perfect straight edges that meet in one straight line (like a fancy jointer does), but rather two curves that you shape to be identical/parallel; it workes anyway, just a little more elbow grease required.

Once happy with the fit of the joint I marked and drilled 7 holes for dowels on the board's edge to strengthen the joint and prepared 3 little pieces of wood that tie the board together on the underside. Those will just screw on the bottom. (make sure they will fit between the stretchers and mark their position properly. i did not and had to adjust them twice).

I made some wedge driven clamps from cut offs for the glue up of the seat board because I don’t have pipe clamps or other long clamps that could do this job. The glue up was simple yet a little hectic because of the 7 dowels that needed glue first and then the edge itself.

Just three rectangular pieces cut to size. Planing the big surface of the back rest was my good mood compensation for the fiddly seat board jointing. Recommend it ;). (wait is it joining or jointing? i am a little confused)

The Stretchers get screwed to the legs assemblies. The seat board just slides into place and gets screwed to the stretchers from the underside also with pocket holes. The back rest gets screwed to the back legs also using pocket holes. Really simple, but get a second person to help you, that’s much easier.

As you can see, the bench structure is done but not the whole project. I didn’t get all steps done in time to include them in this Instructable. I still need to round over the edges and corners, especially the front top edge of the seat board and both long edges of the back rest. All other edges will need a little touch with some sandpaper.

I’m not yet decided on the finish. The frame will just get two coats of simple clear oil or varnish. The back rest probably looks best with a clear varnish as well, but I am thinking of painting the seat board. Any suggestions? Maybe dark green or red? It will get beat up a bit with time anyway, it’s a kitchen bench after all and I like a rustic look, but I find weathering must be earned with time not be applied ;).

I had a blast finally getting into woodworking after just watching tons of videos and checking out what other people made here on Instructables for a long time. Of course, a hundred small things don’t go as you imagine them to or things just don’t work or take for ever (It took me like 4 hours sharpening the plane blade with metal wet sandpaper…). But finishing a furniture piece and now being able to use it every day is very rewarding, and I learned a ton of things during the build.

This was my very first Ible and I would love to get some feedback if anybody makes it this far. What should I improve and focus on next time? What was good and what was not?

I found it difficult choosing between an 'as short as possible' explanation and a lengthy one trying to explain my thoughts and mistakes and helping other beginners with my experience. What style do you prefer?

Also if you are a beginner woodworker as well and have any questions about this project or how I made up for not having many nice tools or a big space to work in, please ask me (if I am good at one thing yet, I think it is improvising).

Thank you for reading and see you around :)

Rabauke