How to Build a Bench Seat

hey kids hey thank you so much for uh your encouragement with the lowe's sponsorship um i thought it was a good fit and fit in right with my channel so i was happy to do it and team up with them for father's day to recognize some fathers out there so remember to get your dad's projects in um with uh dad how do i at lowe's home improvement and hashtag dad built this and throughout the next couple of weeks i'll be surprising dads with uh some five thousand dollar gift cards and then lowe's and its partners will also be surprising other dads with uh hundreds of gift cards so i got a bonus video for you today actually it's going to replace my thursday video because it's a pretty long video it's on how to build a bench um using about thirty dollars worth of materials um it'll be covering lots of tools so i'm getting out ahead of everything here a little bit um but i wanted to produce this for for lows for this weekend for this week uh so um we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves again on the tools i'll eventually cover them all in depth but i kind of needed these tools for this particular project please remember to wear eye protection i wear my glasses so i'm covered but if you don't wear glasses wear eye protection also be very careful i'm using a compound miter saw in this video um i call it a chop saw just for simplicity's sake but it's really a compound miter saw or just a miter saw would usually do as well so be very careful because those saws can do you know they're meant to rip through wood so they can do a lot of damage to other things too so please be careful i also want to uh call out my local lowe's manager marquise great guy he's just such a a great young man and i wanted to recognize him because he's uh he gives me hope for the future just a great young man um and first i got a dad joke for you too uh that's actually dad advice i would say don't trust atoms they make up everything yeah so on behalf of myself and lowe's just want to say happy father's day to all the amazing dads out there and we can't wait to see what you built all right so here's what the project's going to look like it's going to be a bench fairly simple bench that way you can just about anybody could do this with limited amount of tools and there's different variations we could do on it so i just need a one two by ten board two by ten inch by eight and then one two by four by eight we won't need that whole eight foot board but um and you'll see how we're going to do that and then we need two brackets and then two packs of these brackets so those are the brackets i need and then these are the the l brackets that i'll need two two sets of them and you'll see what those are for and then some screws if you can see those screws uh i think i need about 12 of those and then glue is good and then another variation that we'll want with this is um you'll use a dremel if you want to you don't have to it's just another added touch that we can use so i'm going to go ahead and get started okay so when you pick out a piece of board you what you really want to do um so this is really rough i went for that i'm actually okay with it looking rough um because i'm kind of going for that look but when you when you pick out a piece of board what you want to do is you actually want to hold it like this and look down it and make sure it's not curved curve that way or curve this way um okay and then look at look at it that way just make sure that it's not it's not bowed because if you start with a bowed piece of wood uh you're gonna be hating it so um okay so i'm gonna go ahead and cut this board over here i've got my two by 2 by 10 and then i'm going to cut i'll cut that one right after that so i'm going to get a different angle for you okay so i'm getting ready to make my cut and um i'm going to cut two 16 inch pieces off of this six two 16 inch lengths okay and then i'm going to want a four foot board left over so i got plenty of wood here so what i'm going to do i'm going to cut this edge off just to make sure it's a nice clean edge first then i'm going to measure 16 inches and cut that measure another 16 inches cut that and then i'm going to measure four feet right so 48 inches and cut that so i'm going to go ahead and do that real quick so here we go we're going to go ahead and cut 16 16 and 48 okay and here's how you use this saw and work from front to back so we take it and bring it all the way here so there's that i'm going to measure 16 inches mark it make sure you pay attention to which side of that line we're going on right we want to make sure this is 16 inches so we want to go on this side of the line right you can just set the blade down and adjust it okay okay we're ready to go okay next one we need those both to be the same size because those are going to be our legs and we want it otherwise we'll be wonky right all right all right so those are 16 now we just need 48 for our bench this is going to be for my daughter's uh bed she has a queen size bed it's 60 inches across and she wanted it to be just in just a little bit so we're going to make this one 48 inches for our top we can actually just flip this around just make sure you go on the right side of the 48 inches and i'm using this too you can see um because the height the height of this saw and i think most chop saws like this are uh three and a half inches so this is three and a half so you can use this as a nice helper on this side put it over here to support that other side right if you don't have somebody else to help you so now okay okay that's just a scrap so we got that okay that's our basic bench and then now we're going to cut this board and we're going to want it to be 36 inches in between you'll see where it's going to go i already know um i already know the sizes so anyway it's going to be 36 inches so let's go ahead i'm going to cut off one end just so we make sure it's a nice straight edge and when you're using the chop saw too make sure everything's pushed up against the fence this is called the fence and make sure it's pushed up clean against there and you hold it against there okay so now i'm going to cut this at 36 inches okay i got all my pieces cut and we'll start assembling um i may end up having to move that inside i'm outside in my backyard um because i don't have a shop uh so um so you probably heard the crows chirping in the background but um anyway so i will kind of build it from here that's kind of a i wouldn't say that's the hard part but and i think um if we weren't social distancing you might be able to get those boards actually cut if you don't have a saw or you could stop you could cut it by hand right um or um sometimes i think at lowe's they'll actually um cut it for you might have to you know sometimes that can take a little longer you could also use like a hand saw a hand circular saw to cut it might not be as accurate as a chop saw but again as we're building your tool um tool kit then you can decide what you think you're going to get a lot of use out of but you might just be able to use a circular saw because that will help you you can rip plywood with that and yeah and you could use it for a chop saw like this just might not be as perfectly square like it would be with a chop saw okay so here's roughly what we're building right so here's my legs and then i got that brace that's that 36 inch brace going in between and then this is the top and there's so many different variations we could do on this we could we could use so there's much i got these brackets on the outside they're going to go here um before we do anything though we're going to have to um we're going to have to sand sand the wood down and so i just wanted to show you what but what the final product looks like and like i was saying um so with that dremel um you can add um kind of some cool designs on it and make it look like it's beat up and like i said with this board see i've already got it it's really rough and that people are into that these days where you want it to look like it's kind of kind of natural and beat up instead of you know perfectly straight wood so um this is going to take me a little while i'll show you what what that take what that um or how to do it and then i'll sand these boards down before we come back together and put this together and then we'll um and then you can even stain it too so it all it all depends on what you want to do another thing we could do depending on if you got the tools or not right you could cut a notch in here for the feet that's kind of had to touch i might do that i'm just trying to show you you could just do this and it'd be pretty cool it's pretty cool project but it all depends on how far you want to take it so i'm probably going to take it a little bit a little bit further just because i have access to the tools okay i'm getting ready to use my dremel on this uh and but i thought i'd show you this too so i started to work this out and then i realized i probably should show you these are called side cutters and they're pretty handy this one's this one's getting pretty old but um anyway so this there's a nail that's stuck in the side of this and again you know we're going for kind of a rustic look anyway so it doesn't really matter but um so it doesn't matter that even that the holes are there but that's how you pull those out they're pretty pretty easy to do that so so i'm gonna go ahead and show you um what i was gonna do with the dremel because you can kind of rough it up i already started right here where you can kind of make it look like it's it's rough even right even though it's a it's planed and looks good you can rough that back up so it and all you do i got a sandpaper on the end here and then i just turn it on and then they just start working okay so we're going to be using uh my sander here okay and i just want to show you how that works if you've never done it before um basically sandpaper comes in a sheet a meat and a half by 11 sheet i think is what it is and it has different grits so on the back it says p80 and what that means is it's 80 grains of sand per inch okay and so when you get when you're just trying to do something rough you want to go lower so like 80 or 60 or 40 if you're really trying to get stuff off and then as you want to get if you want to get it smooth you go on up so you go 120 200 400 is really fine and so it gets a really smooth and for this we just kind of want it to be rough so i'm going to go ahead and use an 80 plus it helps to you know if you're using a fine sandpaper it's hard to get this stuff off okay so and how this works is you just basically take it if you don't have a scissors you can just bend it in fourths okay i'd have to bend it both ways make sure you get a halfway decent plankton does have to be perfect of course okay so we're just going to rip it flip it that way and we fold it again okay okay rip that again get it started and rip it and that piece right there is meant to fit on a hand sander okay and with the way this one this particular one works i probably need to get a new one this one's a little bit old but and a little cheap but it's worked and so i just keep using it until it dies right okay so there's that and then all you do is just i think i want to start from the back side so you just stick it in here that's the way this one works other ones work differently but and then you clamp it down okay and i fold it over and then same thing over here just tuck that in in there i might have to finesse it a little bit but get it to curl up inside come on okay and then i got it and then i can clamp it down okay so now we're good to go with the sand and i'll just kind of show you what that is um just to speed things up i'll do this on my own but i just want to kind of show you what that looks like so let me move the camera real quick all right so here's the sander and my extra paper and basically i'm just gonna let's go ahead and show what that looks like because you can see that see that mark right there that paint we're gonna take that off [Music] okay much easier than trying to do that by hand right um and another thing we could do rather than use the drum hole is we can also use this on this edges to rough it up so i'll do that too okay so you can see what that looks like we can play around with that so i'm gonna go ahead and basically do all these pieces of wood um before we assemble it um but i just kind of wanted to show you what i was gonna be doing and you know i might go ahead and sand it first and then i might even cut those v's in it so but i'll i'll show you when i do that okay so we got everything sanded down and um you know i added some notches too like i said with that dremel just to make it look like it's used a little bit a warm or rough cut and then you can see see where i've done it here too put a big gash in there it's a little bit of work i'm not gonna lie it takes a little while you could use a belt sander or something for this too um the dremel works really well as long as you have uh a good rough sandpaper you can get through it fairly quick see how the edge looks kind of cool there too so it's like a good a good painting though you don't want to do you don't want to overdo it because then it looks tacky right so um so just play around with that and you'll get better at it as as you go along um and then also i am going to go ahead and cut a notch i already cut the first one um i got a notch in it so i'm going to cut a notch in the bottom of this and the way you do that the easiest way is um okay if you're gonna be good at uh woodworking you have to gonna have to get good at fractions okay because uh it does get a little tricky so you're gonna have to get pretty used to a tape measure and how it's divided up right so so this is nine and a quarter so quick tell me what's half of nine and a quarter four and five eighths very good very good so four and five eighths okay so we wanna go right in the center four and five eighths okay and obviously you can do this however you want but the way this is how i'm going to do it though i'm going to do a four and five eighths that's right in the center that tells me where the center is and then i'm going to go up from there i'm going to go up four inches okay and then from each side i'm going to go in three inches this doesn't have to be perfect again we're trying to uh make it look a little rough so it doesn't have to be perfect but you want it to be close otherwise it's gonna look bad so let's go ahead and draw a line from the center up to that four inches okay and then i'm gonna connect the dots here so this is three running over to there and the same thing here okay that's what our foot's gonna look like right so this is i already cut one out just so you can see what it looks like i'm going to go ahead and cut this one out and basically i'm just going to use this this jigsaw here um to cut that out right this one happens to be a cordless um fairly easy to use uh and then you can use a corded one too i think they probably have a little bit more power but anyway so i'm gonna go ahead and cut that out so be careful of your table right we don't want to cut into our table so just cut right in here so if you look close here i'm using the dremel on this too again we want it to kind of look rough i'd still need to sand it but you can see how you can kind of make it look like it's a a beat up piece of wood because that's again that's real popular these days okay so i'm gonna go ahead and finish up this leg and then the other leg and then sand it and then then we'll get ready to stain it and we're getting close now okay so um we're getting close here um but right in here it's a little bit tough to get with the what i was the piece that i was using on the dremel but that's what's cool about the dremel is you have all kinds of different tips you can use so i'm going to use this tip here and so i can get down in that crevice and clean that out good see so that's much cleaner and then now i'm going to go ahead and sand it down and then we should be good to go with this one okay so we're getting ready to to stain it um i would highly recommend you pick up some gloves because if you don't you're gonna end up with stained hands and it takes a little while to get get that stain off okay so i normally just like to wear just some latex gloves and then i just use a rag and we'll start with this one i already i'm just playing around with it on one of the other legs so and it all depends on how much you let it soak in um to how dark it'll be so just kind of work it around and what's cool about this you could pick a red stain you can pick uh whatever stain you'd like to change it to whatever color you'd like so um anyway this is pretty a pretty simple process you want to go ahead and do this this is just much easier before you actually build the build the bench because um if you go to build the bench and then and you stain it afterwards um then your you know the holes and that sort of thing you're working around your brackets it's just harder it's so much easier if you just go ahead and do this first so all right so i'm just going to go ahead and finish this up just stain all these different pieces um before we assemble them so obviously that's fairly simple um the one thing you want to remember when you when you're staining though this uh the rag can be flammable so when you're done don't throw a pile of rags in a garbage can um because they can actually ignite so you want to after you're done with this you just lay out the rag okay and let it dry out all right so i'll go ahead and finish staining these and then we'll uh and then we'll just put it together okay so i'm just about done staining um i've got a few stained drops on my nice shirt so don't wear a nice shirt when you're when you're staining but i wanted to keep it consistent i didn't want to go change my shirt so oh well um don't do that though right don't wear a nice shirt when you're staining so i'm just about ready just about done and then you just kind of want to let this dry for a little bit so um see i've already stained all those pieces um and then i'm just wrapping up this one so so this is you know again it's just a two by ten fur piece um but when it stains up it looks and that's just a regular 2x4 and i picked out uh i picked that one that was looking rough i think i showed you that earlier so it looks like it's um like it's rough cut almost and see how it got some stain to it it looks pretty and that was a pretty cheap piece of board i think it was like three bucks and i think this this whole two by ten board was like eight bucks right so this is a fairly inexpensive project those brackets were uh you know probably total probably spent less than 30 on this bench um so anyway i'm just going to go ahead and finish the stain in and then cap it and then i'll uh lay out my rag like i told you before and then we'll uh we'll come back and assemble it okay okay so we're back here we're getting real close now right we're gonna add the brackets um but we want to make sure our legs are centered okay so the top was 48 inches if you remember right 48 inches this is 36 inches okay and these are each inch and a half inch and a half an inch and a half okay so inch and a half plus inch and a half is three inches plus 36 is 39 right minus 48 what is that nine right right 48 minus 39 is nine okay i have to think about it myself um so half of nine is four and a half okay so basically we want to do we want to come in from each side four and a half and it should put us right in the center again it doesn't have to be perfect because this bench is fairly rough but four and a half and then cheat that over so that's basically four and a half so so there we go okay so that's where we're gonna be and then we're gonna put this bracket um this bench again is for my daughter i asked her if she wanted because you could paint these brackets too right if you wanted to you could take them aside and paint them whatever color you want she said um just to keep them the silver is fine so so this bracket's going to go on this side okay this bracket will go go on this side and then we got these l brackets okay got these l brackets and they're going to go like that like that like that and like that okay but we want to make sure that's in the center too so we got to take a few measurements just to make sure that's in the center and then what i'm going to also do is i'm going to i'm going to glue this okay and then i'm going to actually before i put these outside brackets on i'm actually going to put a couple screws into here okay because we want that to be solid and then this will be glued and then these will hold that all together because we don't want any screws coming from the top right because another way we could do this is we could from the top put screws down into here and that would hold it too but we don't want the the screws showing on this particular bench you could you could um put put the screws in sink them down a little bit and then you could put cut a dowel and stick that dowel down inside there that looks kind of cool but we're trying to keep this fairly simple like i said i mean i i've added these cuts to it um on the legs you don't have to um yeah so and i did the dremel to it right i've sanded down so you don't have to do that you can keep it real simple i've stained it you don't have to do that so it's however elaborate you want to make it okay so here's what i did i ended up marking this board so i knew where i was gonna um where i was gonna put that board right so it just makes it that much easier and then uh we're gonna go ahead and put glue on here and then put that there and then i'm going to drive a couple of these screws these are really nice screws because they're coated okay and you want to make sure we're going through it and a half and we want to make sure we get a bite there right so we're gonna uh this is i think these are three inches maybe even three and a half inches but the nice thing about them is they're coated and they drive right through like butter if you use this type of screw which we're going to use on some of the smaller brackets because they need to be shorter um they'll they squeak and make all kinds of noise right so um anyway you'll see that this thing drives right through so i'm gonna go ahead and do one side and then i'll do the other side and i'll show you okay so i'm gonna go i went ahead and put a couple dots here to tell me where i'm gonna put those uh screws okay so i'm gonna go ahead and start those i'll just make it that much easier when i go to when i go to put it in the side there if i already got them started it doesn't have to be exactly on those dots it just kind of it's got to be somewhere close okay see nice so i'm probably gonna go up a little higher than where i put that down okay um i know that i have this is three and a half inches here so i know i have three and a half inches so so i'm good right okay so now we're gonna put some glue on this okay so i went ahead and put some glue some glue on this edge okay and now we're gonna go ahead and set this guy up here and i've got that marking like i said right showing where that's going to go so you're going to be able to see this okay so we've got that and we're gonna just press that up tight now we're finishing those screws all the way in okay okay that's that side we're going to do the same thing to the other side okay so we're on the back side of the other one i'm just going to show you what that looks like from this side um i'm making sure on this side that everything is lined up right on this side i'm making sure everything's lined up with those lines that i put so then you just hold it tight i put glue on that and then we do the same thing here again okay same thing here okay so before we put this the legs on we want to put glue on it okay so we're going to go ahead and put some glue here across this racket running across and then here okay now we can flip it over and we know we want to have this four and a half inches from here so we want to be close since we already put the glue down we want to make sure we're close when we put when we flip it down right so we don't have glue where we don't want it to be so roughly there doesn't have to be perfect again so now i'm just going to take it i'm going to flip it over i can see my little mark there right perfect okay so now four and a half inches we want to make sure we're four and a half inches right like we talked about before so i need to slide it a little bit more this way okay four and a half again doesn't have to be perfect but we want to be close okay so now we're putting that guy there and the bracket is i want that middle hole to be at four and five eighths because this is nine and a quarter so four and five eighths again doesn't have to be perfect but we want to get close okay so i'm gonna go ahead and put down one we're not going to um screw this completely together yet um we want to get it close and you'll see why because you want to make sure everything on the other side too so we'll make sure things are flush here okay okay okay i'm probably gonna put one more screw in here just to hold it but then we're gonna go do the same thing on the other side okay so just flip the bench around just to make it easy and i'm just going to go ahead like we talked about we're going to go ahead and just put in a couple of screws here probably do this one here okay go ahead and put one here and make sure the bench is tight down okay and then one more here and just make so i'm pushing on this on this middle brace here pushing down making sure everything stays flush right okay i think i can just go ahead and bypass that one because there's another screw right there so i'm not going to worry about it let me grab a couple more screws so we'll finish this one off [Music] okay i can flip it around i don't want to put a whole lot of pressure on those brackets yet so make sure you just support it from the bottom flipping it around everything looks pretty good um now we'll go ahead and put these last couple of screws in [Music] okay we're getting there we're almost done so now we're just going to put a bracket here bracket here bracket here and bracket here and we are done so um let me measure those out okay so i'm just about done um and the way i'm spacing these out is i got it doesn't really you know again this doesn't have to be perfect you could put them here and here the only thing is is if you um if you put them right directly across from each other then they're gonna the screws are gonna bump into each other right if i put this here and this here and i put the screws in they're gonna run into each other so you just wanna offset them a little bit um so i got these ones coming in uh let's see let's do that at six and we'll do that one at six and then we'll just offset the other ones a little bit on the other side okay so let's go ahead and screw those in okay and again i like to put a few screws in and then work my way around and then come back and finish them up so you're not don't put all the screws in this one because then you might not you might need to wiggle it or something so it's good to just put a couple there a couple here a couple there and then go back and then finish it all up um if you've ever put them together put together something uh like a cabinet or something they always want to kind of leave stuff kind of loose until you um then go back and tighten things at the end because it makes it much easier rather than tighten this side and then this side's loose and then you're trying to reef on it to get it to line up so i'm gonna go ahead and finish these up and then what we've just about done okay we just about wrapped it up here there you go how about that you're uh you're in business so um we're gonna go ahead and what i'd like to do i think and you always want to do this when you make a project is uh sign it you know make sure to sign it and date it and so that you know it went down years down the road people were wondering who who made that um they know that uh it was made by a relative so it's kind of cool to do that so like i said i'll just sign it um because i mean this for my daughter i'm just gonna say to christine love you dad um and then the date so there we go so um hopefully you'll feel like you can do that too it's a fairly fairly simple project but it looks pretty cool and this will be um for the bottom or at the end of her her bed so okay you got this all right so i hope you learned something uh or how to build a bench if that's something you're interested in doing and just a few different variations on it so i just want to again encourage you to to go out and try something that maybe you're a little uncomfortable with be careful with that compound miter saw and your fingers right so be very aware of that if you're running machines like that you know you've got to be very respectful of that of that saw because it's ripping through wood it'll rip through other things just as easy or if not easier so please be very careful when you're dealing with stuff like that so uh all right i just wanted to wrap up and say you've got this i'm proud of you and on behalf of lowe's uh happy father's day to to all the fathers out there and we can't wait to see what you built or what your dad built thank you