We moved into our house about 2 years ago. The back den was a horribly cold and dark area which I used to house the lawn mower for the first few months we lived here. We decided to remodel the back den and hired a guy who gave us a really lowball offer. After about a month of incessant coffee breaks and cell phone calls while his elderly father in-law actually did the work, we started to doubt the guy’s ability. When he didn’t show up for a week we fired him and I took over the project.

He had installed our new window which was actually three windows joined together in one unit. He did a very poor job of framing it out and starting on the casing, apron, etc. My wife had just wanted one thing out of the room and that was a nice craftsman style casing around the window. So I removed most of his bad work and surprised myself by producing the project you see above.

It was a great first project….(any project which allows me to buy a new table saw and router is a great project!!) I took many trips to the lumber yard to find materials. Most of it is 1 inch white pine. The apron on the bottom is actually faked out…it’s just a piece of molding because I cut the stool a bit too shallow. That’s why you see that thin banding under the stool…it’s hiding the fact that the apron is rounded on both edges. :-)

The header on top was assembled on the ground….it’s a 10 foot 1×10 with crown molding glued and nailed along the top and a thin 1 inch wide strip of molding glued and nailed to the bottom. Then it was lifted into place on top of the stiles.

I really wish the pieces were all completely flush and that I could have gotten the stool to actually be level…things that only I will ever notice, I’m sure.

The whole thing was coated in one coat of polyeurethane….in these pictures it is raw.

After completing a custom casing around our new window I was staring at the scrap pile of wood one night and got an idea. At about 3am I had built my first child’s toy. I was rather proud of the fact the entire table of this workbench came from scrapwood. My wife bought some tools for the bench and a few months later I added the back. (For that I actually Paid for wood. About $15 worth.)

The 1xS are all white pine, joinery is all butt jointed with nails and glue.
The backing was rabbeted on the tablesaw…(first time!)
Whole thing was covered in just one coat of polyeurethane.