Start Building & Refinishing Furniture

By Maureen and Chip

Retirement brings free time and lots of possibilities. My husband and I have always enjoyed making or fixing things so we decided to try building furniture. We are FAR from professional woodworkers but we found some fun projects during our first year of retirement. Patience is key and watching Do it Yourself (DIY) / YouTube videos offer great tips. You can also learn about wood-working through courses at community colleges or courses offered in your town. Your local library may also have some books on woodworking.

Tools

Our garage became our part-time workshop. Not a lot of fancy high-end tools. We probably use a Miter saw the most. We also need a jigsaw, drill with drill bits, hand or electric sander, Kreg tool, and clamps (as many clamps as you have). A router is also nice to have to make rounded or more fancy edges. If you find you need large boards cut, Lowes/Home Depot will generally cut them for free. And as Norm Abrams of “This Old House” fame says, ‘Before using any power tools, read, understand and follow all safety directions!’ Wear a dust mask and ear protection too!

Wood

Wood can be expensive. There’s some beautiful high-end wood out there like cherry, walnut or maple, but if you’re starting out it’s best to use pine. There are expensive and inexpensive grades of pine, but again if you’re starting out, a less expensive piece of wood should do fine. If you make a serious mistake cutting a board, buying another $4 board won’t seem bad vs. a mistake on a $60 board of the same dimensions.

Plans

We found Ana White online and she has a fantastic website with many plans and ideas for building furniture. There are many other websites with DIY plan instructions, you just have to search. For us Ana White has been our go to website. We found other sources of plans on Reddit – r/Woodworking (their woodworking section has 2.5 million users sharing all sorts of woodworking tips), The Design Confidential, and Instructables.

Some of our projects building furniture

We found a similar bedroom end table (picture below) in a very high-end coastal home furnishing catalog. We searched thru Ana’s plans, found, and then made the bedside table below. Once we had all our supplies, we timed it, and it took about 2 hours to cut all the wood pieces. Then over a long weekend it literally took about 8 hours to put the table together. After we finished the table, we both agreed we would only make the one table since it took so much time. However, two months later we decided why not make a second bedside table since we knew how and indeed the second table took far less time to make.

After making the Ana White bedroom end table we improvised a design and made an entry way table. We used stains and once the stain dried, used Johnson’s Paste Wax to give the wood a nice protective coating and smooth luster. It’s a functional piece – far from high end.

Below is a Rustic X coffee table we made from Ana’s plans that we modified slightly to fit our room. For the blue table top we used a blue stain and painted the base white. Once the table dried, we applied paste wax for a smooth finish.

Refinishing Furniture

If building furniture seems too daunting, refinishing furniture may be a nice option. There are many YouTube videos for restoring / refinishing furniture.

Perhaps you have a piece of your own furniture you want to tackle. Or you can find a used piece. There are online sites offering used furniture e.g. Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and Freecycle where folks give away or sell used furniture that you can refinish. Getting a free piece of furniture and rescuing it from a potential landfill is a great feeling of accomplishment.

We found a post for a free dresser. It had “good bones” but some loose drawer fronts, out of track drawer bottoms, cracks, and some water damage. The pics below show the transformation. This took time and patience, but it turned out well. Once repaired and put back together we sanded and painted the dresser, and added new drawer pulls. Two coats of paste wax were applied for a smooth finish.

Making decorative pieces

A bit of whimsy, we took three boards from a standard pallet we had saved in our garage. You’d be surprised how many people are giving away pallets. We took one pallet apart, (not an easy task) then glued three boards together. We then trimmed the sides so they were flush as some pallets have uneven edges.

We found a shark clipart online and screen shared to our TV. Next, we enlarged the clipart to about 2 feet in length and traced the shark onto a piece of white tissue paper (the kind used for gift packages). We cut the tissue paper shark outline and used a black marker to draw the shark onto the pallets. 

My husband used a jigsaw to cut the shark outline. (Hard to describe – see photo below). We painted the shark a navy blue and added braces to the back for reinforcements (see second shark photo). “Bruce” hangs in our grandson’s room. 

If you decide to try refinishing or building furniture, have fun with your projects!! It can be very rewarding.

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