I Built a Bench

Over the past few months, I’ve been dying to take some woodworking classes. A few years back, my dad helped me build a console table and a table top for my coffee table. I fell in love with the whole process and lately the itch to get back it came up. There’s something so cool about designing a piece, cutting the wood, building the piece and finishing it. The icing on top is of course showing it off in your house, styled just the way you want.

My friend Paige and I finally found a class that worked with both of our schedules. This past weekend we took a ‘make it, take it’ bench-making class at Chicago’s Rebuilding Exchange. Both of us have an affinity for making things, fixing up our apartments, DIYs and now woodworking. Paige is also a graphic designer, so maybe that’s why we naturally have so many of the same hobbies.

The class was the perfect introduction to basic sawing techniques, drilling and building. We built the entire bench from reclaimed 2 by 4′s and used both the circular saw and a hand saw. It was cool to use both, but the hand saw took forever and was a serious workout. But like I said, still a good skill!

I’d actually used a drill and a circular saw before, but this definitely gave me more confidence in using both. After three hours of sawing, cutting, sanding and learning, we had ourselves two fabulous new benches (and a few really cheesy pictures of us sitting on them)!

I highly recommend their classes to anyone wanting to learn something about woodworking, it’s a blast. They have a side table class, but what I really want to learn is how to build a dining room table! Baby steps… Blair, baby steps. Anyway, I clearly had a blast, the class was so much fun and I’m ready to sign up for some of the more advanced classes to learn more techniques and someday design and make all kinds of cool wooden things!