Nightstands
August 8 2023
How I built nightstands.
Rather than donating my family’s old futon, we opted to reuse the wood for other projects. I decided to try building myself some nightstands.
Phase 1: Design and Tops/Bottoms
This project started out over the 2021 Christmas holiday. I had a lot of fun just hanging out in my dad’s shop, slowly making progress on the design and construction of these nightstands.
![Step 1](1.jpg)
I ripped out all of the smaller pieces of wood from the futon I could. It ended up where I had a fair bit of thinner, wider planks and quite a lot of thicker but narrower slats. As such, I ended up coming up with a design that would use the slats nearly as-is.
![Step 2](2.jpg)
The planks were cut to matching lengths and glued into larger panels to form the top and bottom of each nightstand.
![Step 3](3.jpg)
I wish I had had access to a belt sander or tabletop planer at this point to really even out the tops, as it required a lot of manual effort.
![Step 4](4.jpg)
I played around with a couple of designs until I found an idea for what I thought would look good and make use of the slats without series re-working.
![Step 5](5.jpg)
The tops / bottoms were glued into rabbets made on some of the slats edges to make them flush. I did this with a hand router followed up by sandpaper.
The corners were just cut to 45 degrees on a miter saw, and of course they were ever-so-slightly off.
![Step 6](6.jpg)
A little work with the planer and random orbit sander got the tops looking pretty nice and ready for assembly.
![Step 7](7.jpg)
I experimented with using brads to align the columns while gluing them onto the ends, but they actually ended up misaligning the columns. I opted not to use brads on the other end of each nightstand.
Phase 2: Assembly
The second phase didn’t wrap up until almost a year and a half later, as I struggled to find time to work with wood on top of everything else I had going on. As I was taking time off from working, I was finally able to get back to these.
![Step 8](8.jpg)
I had to finish cutting 45 degree ends into each slat, and sanding them down to get them ready to take a finish. I started the process with a Japanese pull saw, and nearly went insane. Waiting until much later when I had access to the radial arm saw was orders of magnitude better.
![Step 9](9.jpg)
I spaced each slat by clamping it to the columns while sitting on my speed square. This ended up being way more consistent than I expected.
Gluing all of the slats took about a week because I did not have enough clamps.
I should have been much more careful about the amount of glue I was using because I ended up wasting hours cleaning up the dried on glue out of the small inside space of the nightstands and the smaller grooves between slats.
![Step 10](10.jpg)
Getting the ends glued on was actually a challenge because the columns were too far apart to fit within the slats already attached to the end. I slightly split one of the end pieces trying to force it on, so I had to back up and sand down the columns to fit.
In trying to even out the tops and bottoms, I accidentally chipped off some edges/corners. I used woodfill to repair it as best possible, which evened out well but is very obvious in the final surface.
After this point, I spent a ton of time sanding each nightstand body with each grit from 80, 120, 180, 220 through 400. The end result was an insanely smooth surface.
![Step 11](11.jpg)
I chose to use premade legs during the initial design, and I had been holding onto the parts since then. By this point, I was very happy with my decision as these were incredibly quick and easy to attach and looked great.
![Step 12](12.jpg)
I couldn’t quite get the legs to all be at the exact same angles, but it looks good enough.
![Step 13](13.jpg)
I decided to try something different and use Danish oil for these. I like the natural wood tone, and it was super easy to use.
![Step 14](14.jpg)
I’m pretty happy with these. They’re unique, look pretty nice and seem sturdy. And it’s cool to have something new built out of my old furniture.