Build Furniture Without a Shop

It doesn’t take much. Inexpensive home-center tools and materials can be used to build pieces that are surprisingly sophisticated. All it takes is a little ingenuity and some decent designs.

A few tools can go a long way.

When you get started in woodworking there are many paths to follow, forks in the road, dead-ends and shortcuts. It’s a journey that our forebears would make with the help of a living, breathing guide: a master, a grandfather, a shop teacher.

Sadly, the guides are fewer in number today. And so you are left with people like me to help. Like the making of meat byproducts, it’s not a pretty sight. Getting your woodworking instruction from books, magazines, YouTube and an occasional class is a slow way to learn a complex task. In fact, many woodworkers spend a long time (years!) simply accumulating machines and tools before they ever build a single stick of furniture. And when they do begin to build, they inevitably discover that they actually need different machines and tools to make what they really want to make.

So they buy more tools and machines.

I want you to know something important that doesn’t get said much: There is another way to begin building furniture. You don’t need a table saw, a workbench or even a shop. You don’t need to spend $1,000 to build your first birdhouse. You can go to the home center in the morning and build something in the garage on the same day.

I’m not talking about building junk, either. The difference between a nice-looking set of bookshelves and a rude assemblage of 2x4s isn’t a table saw. The difference is cleverness, sound design and just a wee bit of patience.

To build nice furniture you need three things: A handful of decent tools that you won’t outgrow, some help getting started and some realistic projects to build.

Eventually, you’ll probably outgrow this approach to construction as your skills improve. I bet you will want a table saw someday. And a drill press. And a smoothing plane. When that day comes, however, you’ll also have a house full of well-proportioned, well-built projects under your belt. You will be ready for those awesome tools, and the learning curve will be mercifully shorter.

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‘I Can Do That’ Tool List

The foundation of the “I Can Do That” approach is the small number of tools you need to build nice and sturdy furniture. Here’s a list of the basic kit.

• 12″ combination square
• 16′ tape measure
• jigsaw
• 10″ miter saw
• 7-1⁄4“ circular saw
• electric drill
• scratch awl and brad awl
• bastard-cut file
• file card
• palm-grip random-orbit sander
• block plane
• combination oilstone
• pocket-hole jig or a biscuit joiner
• 16 oz. hammer
• nail sets
• 4-in-1 screwdriver
• Workmate
• F-style clamps

A jigsaw cuts it all. You can make clean rips, crosscuts and curves with a jigsaw. It’s a safe and easy tool to master, and you’ll always need one, even when you are a master cabinetmaker.

Rules for Tools

I’m not an emotional guy. I don’t get nostalgic about high school, my first car or my first dog. I don’t much hug family members at holiday gatherings. But I do have the deepest respect and affection for my tools. The care you give tools will gush readily into the things you build with them. None of the tools in the kit we recommend should be disposable; if you take good care of them, they will last.

First, take a look at the list of tools in the previous section. You probably have at least a few of these tools already, even if you’re an apartment dweller. The remainder can all be bought at any home center with a minimal investment. But before you rush out and spend your beer money, take a moment to read about my tool-buying philosophy.

Adapt for accuracy. Most home-center tools are designed for home construction. But you can make them accurate for furniture-making. Here, sticky-back sandpaper will prevent your work from sliding around on your miter saw.

You want to be careful when buying tools because these tools should last most of your lifetime. You won’t replace these tools with fancy machinery when your skills advance, so you don’t want to buy the cheapest tools on display in the tool crib.

So what’s wrong with that $39 jigsaw? Everything. Chances are the motor is underpowered, the bearings (if it even has bearings) are flimsy and the electronics are poorly insulated. Push the tool a little hard and it will – no lie – catch fire.

That said, you also want to avoid the tools that are loaded with lots of gizmos and features (with the price tag to match). In general, tools with lasers, bubble levels, wrist straps, micro-adjustable doo-dads and digital readouts aren’t necessary for accurate work. In fact, they might actually make life harder for you.

So I recommend you do two things. First, before you go shopping, do your research so you can see what brands and models are out there. Second, when you go shopping, seek out the brand-name tools, but choose a brand’s stripped-down version of the tool.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you want to buy a random-orbit sander, and you like the DEWALT brand. The company offers the DWE6421K model for $79 and the DWE6423K for $99. The more expensive model has variable speed. And while variable speed might sound helpful, it’s not useful in a sander, really. Skip it and spend the $20 on wood, glue or finish.

This philosophy extends to blades, bits and sandpaper. Buy brand names. Nothing is more expensive than cheap sandpaper, bargain blades or no-name drill bits. But don’t buy the fancy professional accessories with plastic cases and flashy graphics. Flashy graphics are supposed to impress the guys on the job site. At home you’ll impress only the family dog.

Once you get your tools home, treat them like shards of the true cross. Never ever let your tools rust. Rust spreads like a cancer in ferrous materials (iron and steel) and can make your measuring and cutting tools difficult to use. There are a lot of products out there to prevent and remove rust, but the best thing going cannot be found on the shelf: a small can of vigilance.

When you are done with a tool, wipe down the metal surfaces – especially the cutting surface – with a rag that has been soaked with WD-40. Always keep the rag nearby (mine is seven years old) and renew it with a squirt of WD-40 when it gets dry. Wiping your tool down does two things: First, it removes dust from the tool. Dust can carry salt. Salt attracts water. The combination of salt and moisture will start breaking down your iron and steel tools.

Second, the WD-40 helps prevent rust by forming a thin protective barrier, albeit one that must be constantly renewed to be effective. Other people will disparage WD-40 (I once did). Ignore them.

Buying Materials

Another key component to the “I Can Do That” philosophy is that all the materials come from a home center. You don’t have to buy your materials there, but you also don’t have to trek out to some exotic hardwood supplier, learn the foreign language of lumber and spend a ridiculous sum on wood for a purpleheart planter box.

The truth is, you can build a lot of nice things with the run-of-the-mill (literally) lumber and plywood from a home center. You just have to learn how to shop for it.

Yup, from the home center. These Egg Crate Shelves were built in a couple afternoons with materials and tools from the home center.

Let’s talk about home-center wood. In general, you are going to find lots of construction lumber – white pine, yellow pine, Douglas fir and perhaps hemlock. This is sold in thicknesses best for construction: 2x4s, 2x6s, 2x8s and so on. There are times you are going to want to pick through this stuff, but when you do, you need to know that it is usually too wet to be used immediately for furniture. If you buy construction lumber, take it home, crosscut it to rough length and let it dry out for a couple weekends before you dive in. You’ll be glad you did.

In addition to construction lumber, you’ll find hardwoods and softwoods that are thinner and designed to be used for trimwork in a house and even furniture. This stuff has been planed to 3⁄4” thick and is in convenient furniture-sized hunks. But you need to be quite wary of it. Why?

Well, first off, this stuff is far more expensive than wood will be at an old-fashioned lumberyard – convenience costs, I tell you. And though it’s quite expensive, the really flat and clear boards are just as overpriced as the warped, knotty and split ones.

Be choosy. The best wood and the worst wood all costs the same. It’s up to you to find the good stuff. Sighting down the edge of a board will reveal twisting or cupping.

So sort though the entire pile of wood when looking for boards. Yes, you might get dirty looks from the employees; but if you are going to pay $30 for a pine 1×12, then by God you should get the best one in the store. When you are done, re-assemble the store’s wood pile so it’s better than you found it.

What sort of furniture woods are you going to find at the home center? For the most part, lots of pine, red oak, poplar, and sometimes maple and aspen. You can build a lot of nice stuff using this wood, especially if you are willing to paint your projects (we’ll talk about finishing next).

Also, don’t forget to visit the moulding section of the home center. You can get away with a lot of store-bought moulding when building furniture – you don’t have to have a router. And the nice thing is that many stores sell the moulding by the linear foot, so you can cut what you need right there (and get some practice with a handsaw.)

As far as fasteners go, let me put one little bug in your ear. The worst thing you can do is to buy screws and other fasteners in those little boxes and plastic bags. You know, the ones that have five wood screws in them. Those are, for the most part, made from soft metal and cost too much. If I have to buy screws at a home center, I’ll buy a box of 100 or more that are intended for home builders. Heck, I’d buy drywall screws before I’d buy the little plastic baggies.

And as far as glues go, you’re in luck. Home centers have a great selection of glue. Just don’t buy the no-name stuff. It might be great. It might not. The name brands don’t cost much more.

Finishing Materials

When it comes to finishing materials you are in tremendous luck when it comes to shopping at a home center. If you know what to look for you can achieve almost any kind of finish you desire.

First, let me say a word about paint. Don’t let other magazines or woodworkers bully you out of using paint. A lot of excellent and well-made furniture is painted (for example, virtually every Windsor chair ever made). Personally, I love paint on certain pieces. It allows the graphic lines of a project to really stand out. Paint allows you to easily get the color exactly like you want it. And it’s a finish that is hard to mess up. In general, I find that latex semi-gloss paint works very well for furniture. It’s durable, doesn’t stink up the house like oil-based paint and is easy to clean up.

Paint can be pleasant. This Shaker-style stepstool was painted (as was a lot of Shaker furniture) using latex paint available from any home center.

But what if you don’t like paint? Again, you’re in luck. Home centers carry a wide variety of stains. And here’s a trick that you don’t hear a lot: You can mix two (or three or more) stains to get the color you are looking for. Just be sure to mix oil-based stain with oil-based stain, and water-based with water-based.

Mix a winning finish. By combining colors from several home-center finishes, you can create just the right hue for your project.

And while we’re talking stains, I recommend you avoid the products that both stain and protect your project. These “one-step” products are usually just stains with a little more binder material in them. They offer little protection to your project, and I don’t think they look good, either.

Instead, you should protect your wood with some sort of film finish. In general, you are going to find three sorts of products at the home center that will do this.

There will be Watco, Danish oil and tung oil. These usually are a blend of boiled linseed oil and varnish. It’s OK stuff, but you need four or five coats to build up a nice film.

You’ll find lots of polyurethane. In general, I think polyurethane is harder than necessary; plus, it doesn’t bond well to itself. So sometimes a coat can flake off. If you use polyurethane, be sure to sand the finish thoroughly between coats with #320-grit sandpaper or sanding sponges.

You’ll also find varnish or spar varnish. This is the good stuff. It’s a lot like polyurethane, except it’s a bit softer and bonds more easily to itself. Buy a can of varnish and a can of paint thinner/mineral spirits (they are the same thing). Thin your varnish with three parts varnish and one part paint thinner and you can then apply a nice thin coat with a rag. After three coats or so, you’ll build up a nice sheen. Just be sure to sand your finish between coats.

Finally, get some paste wax and some way to apply it. I like the fine synthetic steel wool, which is a gray pad. The gray pad will smooth your finish to the touch and the wax will give the whole project a nice consistent sheen.

Don’t Forget Your Workmate

The last important piece of your toolkit is a Workmate. This is a portable workbench that you will never outgrow, even if you become obsessed with workbenches, build 10 of them and write a book about it.

The Workmate is one of the greatest woodworking inventions of the 20th century. It’s a big vise, a worktable, a clamping surface, a stepstool. With a Workmate, you can work almost anywhere in the house or yard.

How to be clever. You don’t need 10 clamps to create a flat panel. One clamp and a few well-placed screws do the job nicely.

When you buy one, get the nicest one in the store (I know that this contradicts my earlier advice on tools). The plastic ones aren’t so nice. In fact, the best way to buy a Workmate it to pick up an old one from a garage sale. My Jimmy Carter-era one cost me $30 and even included the plastic dogs, which are great for holding panels.

Now Get to Work

Once you buy your tools, pick out a project (check out a whole bunch right here) and get your materials, you should dive immediately into the project. No matter how daunting the joinery journey ahead, I promise you that most of the barriers in woodworking are mental. The first step is always the hardest, and that’s true when it comes to cutting your first pocket-screw hole or sand-shading your first piece of inlay.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the June 2008 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, and has been modified by the editorial staff.