Mini Farmhouse Night Stands

   One of the worst parts about working as a nurse and rotating between nights and days is that I have lots of time when I am trying to switch back to a day schedule when I have nothing to do and lots of time to kill. A few weeks ago, while switching sleep cycles, I found some plans for a really easy bedside table made entirely out of 2x4's. Hannah and I have wanted some bedside tables since we got married but haven't had the money to shell out a bunch for something decent. I personally am not a fan of particle board furniture but that is the only thing we could afford to buy while saving up for graduate school. The 2x4 night stands seemed like the solution for me.

  As I looked more into the tables, I found that the plans came from a lady named Ana White. She has an entire website with plans for DIY furniture and the plans are all free. The furniture is absolutely beautiful. While looking through her site I found more night stand plans and eventually saw this photo.

   The size of the night stands was perfect and they look classy. Best of all, the guesstimated price wasn't going to break the bank. So it was decided, the Mini Farmhouse Table it would be. So on a day off, Hannah and I headed out to Lowe's and Home Depot to price out wood and see how much it was going to cost us in lumber to make a set. We found that the cost of wood for these was going to be pretty much the same either place as the wood used is just construction grade lumber. The shopping list included with the plans made buying supplies a snap.

   We loaded the wood into the car and headed down to my parents house for the weekend so I could help my dad out on the farm. As Hannah and I don't own a saw, we were able to use my dad's saws to get our wood cut. Once cut, it was loaded into boxes and brought back to our apartment. The next day we set to work with our new Kreg Jig. They have much cheaper versions that work great but I am overly ambitious and want to make all sorts of stuff in a few years when we have a house so I opted to go for the bigger jig now.

   Hannah told me that she wanted to do her share so she ended up drilling more than half of the holes with the jig. As you can see, we went ahead and drilled the holes and did all the assembly in our kitchen. If you have a great area to build stuff and it isn't in your apartment, I recommend it. We didn't make a big mess though and now you'd never know that I even did the staining in the kitchen, don't tell our manager :)

I even wrapped the table in some plastic wrap so I could do a little bit of work on the nice flat table.

   I got this far when I realized that the cut list didn't have the boards that the drawers slide on included. I didn't really want to drive 45 minutes back to my parents house to make 4 cuts that were going to be hidden by the trim and drawers so instead I broke out my Bahco Laplander that I take camping and hiking and used it for the remaining cuts.

   The best part is that using the speed square to mark the board made it so my cuts really weren't that far off square. I wouldn't recommend using it to build an entire piece of furniture but it worked in the pinch for the location of the boards. Once the slides were cut and placed, it was simple to finish up the construction.

   Here they are after being all put together but before they got sanded. It was nice to get to this point and be able to see that they were actually going to turn out okay. Hannah was so excited to get home from work and see them all assembled. She told me I had to wait to sand them until she got home so that she could help out. Once she got home, we finally broke down and headed out into the garage as we really didn't want to get the sanding dust all over the stove top.

   We each took turns working on both of the night stands and got them nice and smooth. Then I swept them all off and used a wet rag to get the remaining dust off of them. The down side was that the next day I had to go in to work and I worked the next few days. When I finally had a day off to stain them, the weather wasn't great so I put a plastic drop "cloth" down in the kitchen and stained them while watching Netflix. For being a man, I really do like the multi-task. Minwax Dark Walnut was the stain of choice with a satin Minwax finish over top. 

   Hannah couldn't wait to get them into the bedroom so while I was at work, she moved things around and made some room for them. Today we headed out to Target where we found some lamps that worked with our room. We are pretty happy with how it all came together.

   For a first project, I think that it turned out pretty well. We saved a TON of money building our own. Even buying the more expensive version of the jig, we were way under what it would cost to buy a complete, non-particle board, set of night stands. The best part is now we have the stain and the jig and we can make more stuff. I'm already planning to make us a headboard and a coffee table. Hopefully they turn out as well as the night stands did!