For the past couple of months, we’ve been working on two changes to the front room. The first was to ship my childhood piano up from my parents’ house in North Carolina. And the second was to build the storage bench pictured above.

I built this bench from scratch based on plans in Furniture You Can Build: Projects That Hone Your Skills by Joe Hurst-Wajszczuk. His version of the bench can be seen in the lower center of the book’s cover.

The bench is made of red oak from Spacht Sawmill, including some quarter/rift-sawn oak for the legs. Most of the construction was done at NextFab. This was my first furniture project, so not everything went according to plan. In fact, it turned out the book contained more than a few typos, for example, telling me to cut some pieces 33″ long in order to make a 34″ assembly. That doesn’t work out so well! And then there was the issue with the #4 “brass” (really zinc) screws that just disintegrated under hand-torquing, even with a pilot hole.

But I’m proud of the finished product, and now we’ll have somewhere to sit and remove our boots when we come in from the snow outside.

More construction photos after the cut.