It’s been a while

Hi there! It’s been a while since I blogged last. I almost don’t remember how to do it! We joke that we had PTSD from the renovations on the house, and I’ll admit that it did slow us down from tackling any new projects. That and the fact that we’ve both been quite busy with work, finally traveling some, etc. A few months ago we punted on the idea to build out a banquette in the dining area, primarily because we just didn’t have the energy to do it. The good news is I already have the cushion if you know anyone looking for a long tufted cushion from Pottery Barn! 😉

But all is not lost! For those of you who love a good Heffron project, I think you’ll enjoy seeing this one! Today there is a firepit in our front yard that we fully intend to move to the backyard so it can take advantage of our spectacular view. It will probably be the spring before we tackle that project, as we need to do a lot of gravel work and the quote was a little higher than we were expecting. I’ve pinned a lot of great looking firepit areas and kept coming back to this one.

Sure, we could buy Adirondack chairs but why when we can build them ourselves? 🙂 We could have easily built more primitive ones like the ones above, but we like a challenge! So we ordered plans from Rockler, one of Keith’s favorite online stores. The plans came with templates for most of the pieces, which was key as we started to work on them. But of course before you can cut wood you have to buy it! So off to Home Depot to get some pressure treated wood which will hold up to the elements, since we will be moving these outdoors eventually.

That’s a lot of wood, isn’t it? Well let me tell you, there are a LOT of pieces to our Adirondacks! If Keith was here, I could tell you exactly how many, but I think there were upwards of 40 custom cut pieces of wood per chair. Honestly, we bought this wood so long ago, I really don’t remember how many months it took us to complete all of those cuts. But let’s take a look at the process.

As I mentioned, our plans included templates for most of the pieces, but before we could start cutting out the individual pieces, some of our wood had to be milled down using our planer. Basically you run pieces of wood through it until it becomes the exact thickness you’re looking for. It’s not a glamorous task and it generates a ton of wood chips, but it’s somewhat satisfying to use!

That was a task that both of us worked on as there was a lot of planing to do. Once the prep work was done, it was time to start tracing and cutting.

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I could bore you with even more pictures of all of that and other boring things like all of the sanding we did, but instead, I’ll just show you our new toy. Our drum sander. Because there was SO many curved spots on these, Keith convinced me we “needed” a drum sander for this project. So now we are the proud owners of a drum sander. Oh – and a new regular oscillating sander because we wore our old one out on this project! Now back to the drum sander. What is a drum sander, you say? Well here it is! It basically spins around at a high speed while going up and down along the side of whatever you’re sanding.

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We both spent a lot of time sanding every piece to ensure no one gets splinters when they sit out the end product. After everything was sanded, Keith got to work with the router using his router table and rounded off the edges of each piece – again to make the edges soft and keep splinters away.

Fast forward to assembly day. This was what we were working with!

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That’s a lot of pieces! Basically you assemble the part that sits on the ground and then you start adding the back slats, then the chair slats, and lastly the actual arms. Oh and some supports in different places.

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And now for the big reveal, let me show you our new Adirondack chairs!

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And here they are all together in our basement, where they will sit until I can give them all a good overall sanding. We’ll let them dry out over the winter, as pressure-treated wood is very wet and takes a long time to cure. Sometime next spring or summer I will likely paint them all probably white.

We may also make some end tables and/or footstools, as we do have some leftover lumber. We’ll see! If you have any other great project ideas for us, send them my way!