Sabbatical project: rustic step stool

For a long time, we had a plastic step stool in the bathroom for the children to use. But its upper surface was a sort of corrugated, impossible-to-clean plastic, and one day I gave up on it and threw it out.

For a replacement that was easier to maintain and more in line with the aesthetics of our home, I used some scraps of planks that we had, and built a new step stool.

The planks were originally part of a waterbed frame, which we picked up for free (for the lumber) early in our marriage.  Most of it I built into a child's loft a few years later, but the two longest planks I had to shorten, and it was one of these leftover pieces that I used for the stool, along with two other pieces of scrap wood.

I wanted curved, organic shapes for both the top and the legs.  Easy enough to draw and lay out on the wood, but not quite so easy to cut. I read the manual for our scroll saw, and found that the two-inch (actual, not nominal) thickness of the waterbed wood was right at the limit of what the saw could cut, and would require buying a different blade.

So instead I did all the sawing by hand, by making a number of straight cuts to approximate the curved shape. Then I did the rest of the shaping over time by hand with rasps and files.  This took a fair amount of time, but I was spending a fair amount of time outdoors watching the youngest children, and it was a good carry-along project.

After a lot of hand sanding, I was ready for the joinery. Somewhere along the way, I was browsing in one of our woodworking books, and I learned about a joint that was rather like a biscuit joint, but that used a rectangle of plywood, rather than a thin wood "biscuit", to slot into both of the pieces and connect them. Much stronger than a doweled joint, and I had plenty of thickness in my wood pieces for the slots needed.

To make the slots, I drilled holes to the right depth (you can put a piece of tape around a drill bit to tell you where to stop), and then I used a sharp chisel to remove the rest of the wood. When I was mostly there, I started test-fitting my pieces of plywood, to make sure that I took out just enough wood in the right places. When I was finished, I found that there was a little too much play in the joints. The stool was quite solid when I wedged a short piece of wood between the two leg pieces, so I made that part of it as well.

I glued everything together with carpenter's glue, let it dry, gave it a quick final sanding and wipedown, and then finished it with two coats of polyurethane.

With a power saw, drill, and sander, this would be a very quick project.