You can make cheap furniture out of 2-by-4s.
A simply built bed or dresser bought at a furniture store will cost you far more than it cost the retailer. You can save those profits for yourself, and learn a lot in the process, by building your own furniture out of inexpensive construction lumber. If you can pick up the lumber cheap at a used building materials store, or even free on a construction site or through an online re-use site, your new furniture will be even cheaper. But cheap doesn't have to mean low quality; a well-built 2-by-4 bed can outlast a far more expensive pressboard bed from the store by many years. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
Design for Your Materials
1. Design your furniture to take your materials into account and save yourself a lot of work. You can buy construction lumber in widths of 3.5 to 11.5 inches, and if you keep these dimensions in mind and design for them, you can save yourself a lot of time-consuming gluing work. Remember that the dimensions of construction lumber are nominal: a 2-by-4 is actually 1.5 by 3.5 inches.
2. Design a headboard with individual slats rather than a solid panel. You can rip the slats out of a 2-by-4 with a table saw, which is easier than jointing and planing the 2-by-4s to be flat and square, gluing them together into a panel, then planing and sanding the panel.
3. Take the lengths of lumber that you have into account when designing your furniture so that you use the boards to their maximum advantage. If you have 8-foot-long 2-by-4s, for example, make components that are 6 feet and 2 feet, rather than making something 7 feet long and having 1 foot of waste.
Keep Construction Simple
4. Make your furniture designs straightforward and simple to take advantage of the simplicity of the materials. Construction lumber is made of softwood, usually spruce, so it lacks the enticing grain of fine hardwoods. You can paint the furniture when it's done, or finish it with a simple coat of polyurethane.
5. Join the elements of your furniture with mortise and tenon joints, or bolt the pieces together with carriage bolts for an easier and more rustic look.
6. Select your wood for straightness. Sight down the boards before you buy them and reject any that are excessively warped or skewed. Being picky about your materials will make your job much easier.
Tags: your furniture, construction lumber, into account, rather than, save yourself