BOOK: Building Real Furniture for Everyday Life

Furniture Making Doesn't Get Any Easier Than This!
If you're new to woodworking, you may be a little nervous about actually making furniture. That's understandable, given the complexity of the craft and the cost of materials'not to mention the tools. Well, here's your opportunity for a fearless foray into furniture making. In Building Real Furniture for Everyday Life, author Chris Gleason walks you through the steps of making basic, no-nonsense furniture with very few tools and a bare minimum of materials.

Furniture making doesn't get any easier than this. Most of the pieces in this book are created by simply cutting plywood pieces to shape and then screwing them together. A few pieces, such as the bookcase, are made from 2 x 2 construction lumber and acrylic panels. The materials used for all of these projects are commonly available at your local home supply center.

Quick, but Not Dirty
Furniture making is not typically an exercise in immediate gratification, but these projects are an exception. All of them can be built in less than a day'some in just a few hours. You don't have to bother with complicated joinery, as everything is put together with screws. No, it's not furniture for the ages but, as the book title suggests, it's plenty sturdy enough to stand up to everyday use for a long time.

The fourteen projects span quite a range of furniture. There is something here for almost every room in the house. Among other things, you'll find plans for a dresser and a nightstand for the bedroom, a computer desk and a file cabinet for the office, and a coffee table and television stand for the living room.

So how is it possible to build full-sized furniture like a dresser or an armoire in a few hours' Creatively, that's how. For example, the dresser is basically a screwed-together plywood case that uses plastic storage containers as 'drawers.' Gleason writes: 'This dresser is so easy to build, it almost feels like cheating.' And that could be said for all of the projects in this book'they really are that simple to make! Any unusual parts, such as the turned legs used on the coffee table are bought pre-made.

Tooling Down
You certainly don't need a shop full of equipment to build any of these pieces. You may already own most of the requisite tools. Although a tablesaw would be extremely helpful in cutting the plywood pieces to size, the work can instead be done with an inexpensive jigsaw. You'll need a hand-held power drill to bore holes for the pocket screws, and a few bar clamps to help hold things together during assembly. A power finish sander would be mighty handy, but the sanding could simply be done by hand with sandpaper wrapped around a block.

The only necessary tool a typical DIY homeowner probably doesn't already own is a pocket hole jig, and one can be had for anywhere from about $10 to $100, depending on the model. A small router would be useful for rounding over the edges on several of the projects, but you might even be able to borrow one from a woodworker pal. A biscuit joiner is called for occasionally, but screws can be used instead of biscuits.

As for using the tools, you get a lot of help from the step-by-step photos that show you everything from how to lay out the parts to how to cut and assemble them. Cutlists and project drawings relieve you of any math duties and show you how parts fit together. Some of the skills you'll learn include applying iron-on veneer tape edging (used on a couple of the projects), and how to install European-style cup hinges, as well as installing knock-down fasteners.

So you want to make furniture' Well, here you go. This book will give you a running start at producing your first pieces with very little investment.