Wooden Stools Update

I thought I'd give a little stool update and talk about a new technique which has meant it's now much quicker to make a stool - hurrah!

I'm super in love with my latest stool, maybe because it's dip-dyed pink but also awesome the combo of it being wonky AND structurally sound!

Making a stool usually takes me about a week and a big component of that was drilling the leg holes into the hardwood top, well until I finally set up our drill press!

Ben got given a bunch of tools from his bro, this drill press above being one of them. At the time, I had no idea what a drill press was but they consistently came up whilst googling wood working techniques. My only hurdle - the bolts were all rusted stuck! A few hours later of me being super stubborn and not letting rust win I managed to get everything unstuck, patted myself on the back and set the drill into place. I'm not 100% sure I have it rigged up correctly but even with the current set up it was at least five times faster then hand holding the drill :)

Even though it kind of looks like a face, the main reason I took the above photo was to show the difference in the drilled out holes. The hole on the left was with the drill press and the hole on the right was me hand holding the drill. With hardwood, you can't continually drill, because you'll burn out your drill bit which meant every time I re-started drilling (with the hand hold method) I inadvertently changed angles slightly which meant the finished hole was super messy! The drill press on the other hand, makes sure the angle is always the same.

I've got a bunch of timber I've collected to make a bunch more stuff, which I'm all super excited about! On a side note, our house now has a lot of stools, an item I never knew we needed before I started making them :p

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Wooden Bathroom Stool

I've been all about wood working as of late and decided to do something with a rectangle piece of weathered wood that I'd found. I also decided that we needed a bit more storage in our bathroom so the bathroom stool was born :)

I cut two pieces of timber to add reinforcement where the stool legs sat in - not sure if I needed to do this or if it was more of an aesthetic choice to the final design?!

You can see above how I nailed the planks to the weathered board below and drew some rough pencil circles where I wanted the legs to sit. Then it was just a matter of drilling out the holes with my 38mm spade bit on my drill.

The legs were just a fallen tree branch that I cut down into equal sizes and gave a rough sanding to. When I drill the holes, the circles are never perfect but that's okay because the tree branches are not perfectly round either. I aim to get the leg going into the hole fairly tightly and then if there are any gaps, like you see above, I use sawdust (saved as I'm drilling out the holes) mixed with wood glue to fill in the gaps. The drilled holes also usually determined which leg sits where as I try and get the most smug fit for all. If a leg isn't fitting, you need to drill the hole a bit wider or sand the leg to be slimmer - take everything I say with a grain of salt as well :P

A coat of white paint to the legs and a matte sealer over the whole thing and hey presto finished stool :)

If you have any tips on making stools yourself, let me know, I'm always open to new ideas or smarter ways to do things :)

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