Furniture Archives

Building a Zen Meditation or Seiza Bench for better Posture at my Desk

May 7, 2021September 16, 2021 by Adam@SheekGeek

I used to have a standing desk for years, but since we moved, I haven’t found a similar solution. My posture is suffering because of it. I discovered that by resting on my knees at my computer desk, and raising my computer screen a bit I can get back in to the correct posture. I realized I could build a seiza bench would be the best solution to add a bit of support and reduce stress on my knees.

I began with an exhaustive search online but ended up just making my own. The design I liked most was this travel seiza bench from Sakura Co. While they list the dimensions on their site, I found that to be too short for my needs. I experimented, having my wife help measure how high my butt was from the ground when I was in the best position, but the best experimentation was when I went to build the bench in the garage. I sat on a bucket which happened to feel like a comfortable height. I have a variety of buckets in the garage so I tried them all out. I took measurements of the ones I liked most and went about freestyling the design.

I had an old 7 1/2” wide by 3/4” thick pine board from a previous project laying around the garage, so I began with that. I laid out the 2 heights I measured and drew a diagonal line to connect them. This will be the final angle of the bench. Then I went about measuring and calculating the tab lengths. Here’s what I ended up with.

In that pic, I had already made my first cut. Basically the back of the bench is 11 3/4” tall, the front is 10 1/4” tall. this is a pretty steep angle, but I feels acceptable so far as I’ve been using it, though I haven’t used it much yet and I may end up making a different angled bench.

The tab that sticks up at the top rises about 2 1/8” above where the bottom of the seat will be. It has to be high enough to go through the seat and accept the holding pin to mount the legs with a bit of material on top of the holding pin. That’s how I came up with that measurement.

I tweaked the design from the inspiration more by having my tabs move at a 90 degree angle from the slant, rather than follow the edge of the board as in the bench form Sakura Co. This makes is far easier to construct.

This entire project can be built using 1 pine board, electric drill with a 3/4” drill bit, and a jigsaw. I had other tools available so I used a circular saw to cut the board all the way across as you see in the above pic.

Next, I used the bandsaw to cut the excess material away from the tabs. You can see that I forgot to tune my bandsaw before cutting. This board looks pretty janky.

At this point, I messed again when cutting out the hole for the pin to fit into. I thought it’d be smart to drill a couple of holes just big enough for my jigsaw blade to fit into. I should have used the largest drill bit that would fit the hole instead. This made for a nasty cut where the pin is supposed to be tight.

The idea is to drill a hole or two to give your jigsaw blade enough room to cut the edges and the corners. It takes a few passes from different angles, but I got it done. Now I got my 30+ year old jigsaw out of someone’s garbage can… it’s missing a few screws, but gets the job done, even if it isn’t very clean.

The next board was easier to cut since I tuned up the bandsaw. It came out with much cleaner edges.

I made the same mistake of using too small a bit to drill the hole, however I did learn something. When drilling the hole in the first leg using the spade bit, I just drilled all the way through. This tore out the back and made a nasty edge.

This time, I drilled a into the piece from one side until just the tip of the spade bit poked through the back and I stopped. I flipped the piece over and placed the tip into the hole to line it up and then drilled the rest of the way through the wood. This left a much cleaner edge.

I’ll spare you the carnage from the jigsaw. It was better than the first one, but not good overall.

I then moved on to the seat. I cut a 22” long piece from the board. I measured 2 inches from each end to begin marking where I wanted the legs to mount. Due to the slat, the legs will stick out a bit from the seat about 3/8”. I decided to make the front of the legs flush with the seat and allow that excess to hang out the back. No one will notice that, and I won’t be annoyed by it while using it. I drew an arrow on each of the 3 parts to determine which side was the front. Then I traced the outline of the tabs for each leg on the seat board. I want as tight a fit as possible with this so it doesn’t wobble when I sit on it. Since each leg’s tab is a bit different due to my excrement woodworking skills, tracing the actual shape of the tab will get me a closer fit.

This is when I wised up about the spade bits. I mounted a 3/4” spade bit into my drill press and used the trick of going not quite all the way through the board, flipping it and drilling from the other side for a cleaner hole. Somehow I still managed not to get it perfect.

I made the edges and corners straight with the jigsaw again on each side.

Then I used some scrap wood and cut the pins on the bandsaw. I didn’t get a pic of them alone, but I made them wedge shaped with 2 right angles and a slanted side. One side 3/4” tall and the other 2 1/4” tall. The bottom edge (the longest edge which is at right angles to the sides) is 3 1/4” long. I made two of them.

To even out some of the nasty straight cuts, I went to my trust poor-man’s belt sander setup by clamping my handheld belt sander in my workmate project center and locked the trigger in the on position as I maneuvered the parts on the 150 grit sandpaper. Put the puzzle together and you have a bench!

I use a pillow on the ground under my knees to add some comfort, and I may eventually get either a couple of gardening knee rests (one for my knees and the other for my bum) or an hammock pillow for the seat. Given the ridiculous costs of hammock pillows though, I might just make a thin seat rest pillow myself to tie around the seat.

Ikea Sniglar Crib Hack

May 7, 2021June 11, 2021 by Adam@SheekGeek

Ikea is no slob when it comes to designing great affordable furniture. We chose the Sniglar Crib when our daughter was born because it was solid wood, with no weird finishes or chemicals on it that converted to a bed for about $100. (It looks great too BTW). There’s no end to the hacks for these online, but we hadn’t seen any producing exactly what we wanted so we made our own. I mean, people convert these things into clothes drying racks, porch swings, benches, desks for both adults or children, magazine racks, a baby cage (playpen), you name it. Our hack is much simpler than these.

When our daughter outgrew the crib, we converted it to a daybed as the instructions show, however our daughter kept falling out. Lots of folks online recommended buying a wider piece of wood to replace the bottom support beam which would come up past the mattress. We didn’t like this for several reasons. Firstly, it doesn’t match the aesthetic of the crib. Secondly, we’d have to buy something extra. Thirdly, it is a solid piece of wood, which if your kid rolls over with their face toward the board could restrict breathing a bit.

Our solution was to take the extra side of the crib which the support beam replaced (when it was converted to a daybed) and cut the dowels shorter. I only found one other person who did this, but even that seemed like too much work.

My way is very simple and uses only 4 dowels (you might have to get these, or use cut up parts of a pencil).

First, mark the height you want the new 4th wall to go on the crib and measure to the bottom of the bed support. for us, we likes 11 inches high. You can see that our little helper got ahold of the pencil and tried to help us out by tracing the mark for us.

Measuring from the top edge of the piece we wanted to cut, I wrapped masking tape around each dowel at about 11 inches to prevent tear-out when I saw them. I then marked each dowel at 11 inches and cut each of them using my favorite pull saw for a fast and clean cut. There’s about 20 dowels but it took only about 10 minutes to cut them all by hand.

We then loosened the sides of the crib to give ourselves some working room by turning the bolts and prying the sides slightly apart. The top rail of the crib has two holes for 5/16” dowels on either end. To transfer the position of these holes to the edge supports of the crib, we put our new short side in place. We didn’t attach the bottoms of the dowels to the crib, we just sat them on the bed support frame. This is fine because the top of the crib has two small dowel holes to attach to the crib’s side supports. If there was only one dowel there, it could spin and move but since there are two used it locks the new side into place.

To attach this new shorter side, we made sure it was level and used the dowel centers from a dowel kit I had purchased years ago for some random project (who remembers…) to mark the position of the holes onto the edge support beams of the crib. I was careful not to drill these holes all the way through when I drilled the holes for the new dowels. The doweling kit comes with a drill stop, but I find that tape works better and is quicker to apply. This was done on each side to finish the project.

When finished, we pressed in the new dowels into the holes and turned the bolts on the base to lock all the sides in position.

I’d like to say that this solved the problem of finding my daughter on the ground when I check on her 30 minutes after putting her to bed, but as it turns out, she can no longer fall out of the bed; rather she is now crawling out and bringing her cover and pillow to sleep on the floor next to the bed. Some battles you just can’t win.

DIY Learning tower

February 19, 2019July 9, 2018 by Adam@SheekGeek

Having a toddler that always wants to help in the kitchen, there’s a need to have a safer alternative to having them just stand on a chair to reach the countertop. I had no idea, but this is already a thing called a learning tower. Kind of a overblown name for a stool with guard rails if you ask me, but whatever. As a note, this blog post if filled with affiliate links. I thought you might like to have the entire tools list.

After looking online at learning towers (and learning what they are) I was learning toward buying some IKEA parts and hacking them together like so many others online, however IKEA stopped selling one of the crucial components. This left me having to do some custom work. If you’re in for a penny you’re in for a pound so I started looking at custom designs for learning towers. After about an hour of research Jess just said “go see what scrap wood we have and we’ll cobble something together.”

We happened to have a scrap piece of wood that used to be a leaf blower hovercraft… for… reasons. It was 33 inches by 36 inches. Of course with a hole in it for the leaf blower to mount. That’ll do. It’s just tall enough for our countertop and just wide enough that when split in half it can hold a toddler with a bit of wiggle room. Final dimensions of the sides were 36″tall by 16″ wide.

I sliced it up to be the sides of the learning tower. Then I got to (finally) use my router table and my 1″ diameter 1/2″ depth roundover bit for the first time. The trick is not to have the bit stick up too far on the router table, otherwise you’ll get a nice roundover on the edge, but it’ll cut deep enough to leave the face of the wood raised a bit proud. This would then need to be sanded down (unless you like the look and feel of it). Run this on both sides of each piece to get a nice smooth rounded edge. It makes it safer for tiny hands as well as making it look more professional. I got my router table from Craigslist that a guy had built from this plan on a woodworking website for $10. He was upgrading and it was taking up space so I got it for less than the wood costed him. It didn’t come with the router itself for that price. I had to get my own. It was the perfect excuse to get a beefier router for future projects than the Dewalt DW611 trim router I have in my Xcarve CNC machine. I stuck with Dewalt for the brand and got a DW616 model with the fixed base. I mounted it on the underside of my table and when I need to, I can unscrew it and use it manually.

Now to attach the two side panels. In the old scrap pile, we had an 8 foot section of 1×2″ pine. I have no clue why it was magically there when we needed it, I don’t remember ever buying it. Regardless, it was good to be used. Jess threw out the number of 16″ for the space between the sides of the tower. That worked out to having 6 of these beams. Of course they were a bit shorter due to the kerf of the blade. I cut these using my pull saw and a plastic miter box. The draw saw is the best thing to ever slice bread. Especially for trim pieces, the cuts are very precise, the blade has minimal kerf, and it cuts very quickly. In fact I use this saw over a push saw on all my projects be it cutting 4x4s or moulding. At this point, stumbling our way through the design, we settled on something with ladder-like steps the kid could climb up, and that we could reposition the platform as they grow.

I knocked off the sharp 90 degree edges of the 1×2 pieces using a cornering tool kit. This tool looks like an old can opener and works kind of like a plane to scrape the edges into a smoother shape. I got a kit a couple years ago for a project and have wanted to use them on something else for a while now. I have to say, this is way better than trying to smooth the corners of these small pieces with sandpaper and much safer for your fingers than using a router table for these small pieces.

Normally, connecting pieces of wood in this way leaves much to be desired. If you drill directly into the side panel into the end of the 1×2 piece you’ll have a really weak joint and you’ll see the screw on the side of the panel. It isn’t strong because the wood fibers (visible by looking at the grain) are aligned along the long axis of the 1×2. Wood fibers are basically long tubes that the water gets drawn up into the tree through. When you screw directly into the end, imagine that you are screwing into the end of a stack of straws. The fibers spread around the screw and there’s not much for the screw to grip on. The best way to connect these pieces is with Pocket Holes. I got a great and versatile pocket hole jig made by Kreg recently and this was a great chance to try it out. Probably 10 years ago I got a knock off pocket hole jig made of aluminum to save some money, but it ended up working for barely one project before the guide holes got all wallowed out and useless. It also could only accept a certain size piece of wood as it was a piece of extruded aluminum. This kreg kit on the other hand can accept a wide range of pieces of wood. It also has guides for making the perfect depth hole based on the the wood thickness. The drill guide is completely removable to use on parts in situ as well. All in all, the Kreg kit is the best bet by far.

I messed up one of the beams by not setting the correct depth for the pocket hole, so that left me with 5 total. That works out to 4 on the bottom for the ladder step and platform holder and then one for the back at the top. I typically have found that 1-1/4″ drywall screws are just about the most useful type of screw to have laying around for just about any project, so I used a single screw on each end of the beams to attach them. (Now there are times when to buy different screws, but in most cases these will work fine). To keep the beams from spinning about the screws (even though the pocket holes helped with this by being slightly off axis) I tacked each beam through the side panels with 2 finishing nails from my brad gun.

I then cut a platform out of a piece of 1/2″ scrap plywood to fit between the side panels. To make sure this thing will stay in place, I attached a 1/2″ square dowel on the front and back edges just inside where the platform rests on the beams. I glued it and tacked it with brads.

When we got to this point we realized the design was a little tippy front to back and didn’t sit squarely on the floor. Going back to the scrap pile, I cut out two sets of “feet” about 18″ long and 3″ tall. I then cut these in half so they’d stick out of the front and back more when I mounted them. Of course I rounded them off at the router table again with the same bit. I attached them to the bottom of the tower with wood glue and brad nails that I once again cut off the excess length with a hacksaw and sanded them smooth with an orbital sander. This added 5-6 inches to the footprint on the front and back making the whole thing much more stable.

A touch of wood putty here and there to fill in gaps in the edges of the plywood and cover the most visible pocket holes, a light sanding all over, and a couple cans of dark grey spray paint on the edges and interior did a majority of the finishing. Jess had some wood-flavored contact paper and added that to the exterior of the side panels.

A few coats of spray-on polyurethane on the platform finished that part off. Jess modge podged the edge of the contact paper to the rounded end of the sides and voila’ our learning tower was complete. –Though after use by the sink it was shown that it’s better to use the exterior modge podge instead. It is a little hardier when it gets wet that the regular stuff.

Add an Elegant Hanging Light the Easy Way

June 18, 2013May 13, 2012 by Adam@SheekGeek

For the longest time, we’ve wanted some kind of light above the sink in our kitchen. We finally settled on a simple DIY solution to this problem using the IKEA Hemma cord set. The cord set comes with a long electrical wire that has a normal 2-prong plug on one end, and a light socket on the other. The light socket has a removable screw piece to allow you to attach a lamp shade. The screw piece holds the shade securely onto the light socket end of the cord. The cord itself is quite strong and can easily handle a glass shade hanging from it.

The cord set comes with an open eye hook, but it didn’t work in our situation because there was no stud in the ceiling where we wanted to hang the light. We ended up buying a hanging plant hook kit. We had to modify the hook slightly because the plastic wire hanger that came with the Hemma was too small to fit over the end of the planter hook.

To fix this, I simply cut the end off of the hook with a small hacksaw. The metal was very soft and this took only seconds. If you don’t have a hacksaw, you could possibly use heavy duty wire cutters to cut the end off.

These hanging kits are designed to hold hanging planters which are pretty heavy and come with the parts to install on either a stud or directly into drywall. The drywall anchor is a spring toggle bolt, which is capable of hanging a lot of weight. This is a bit overkill for this project, but it doesn’t hurt. For other projects, you may want to check out which kind of drywall anchor would be right for you. To install this toggle bolt, I used a half-inch spade drill bit to drill a hole in the ceiling large enough to accept the toggle bolt when it is folded.

Once the hole has been drilled, simply insert the toggle bolt and screw the hook until it is tight against the ceiling.

We planned to power the light using a power socket under the kitchen cabinets by the sink but we didn’t want the plug just hanging down from the ceiling for two reasons; 1) Because it is unsightly and 2) because the Hemma wire was several feet too long. What we decided to do was to run the wire inside our cabinets and leave the extra wire on top of the cabinet. To do this, we used a larger drill bit to drill a hole bottom shelf and the top of the cabinets as close to the back corner as possible.

A 1-inch spade drill bit which was just wide enough to handle the plug.

We threaded the wire through the holes and tied a knot just before the bottom hole leaving enough on the other side to reach the plug under the cabinets. This knot should prevent any extra wire from coming through the hole.

To keep the wire out of the way and tidy inside the cabinet, we used small nails to tack it to the back side of the cabinet facing. This also help rout the wire neatly around the inner shelves.

We got a shade from a local Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $2.00. These stores are great because they have a wide variety of random construction pieces and furniture for great prices and the money goes to help Habitat for Humanity. The particular share we got was a bit too big to fit on the screw part of the hemma, so I filed down some of the plastic on the hemma’s light socket to make some room. I was only able to thread a couple of threads on the socket with the screw piece, but that was plenty to hold the shade.

All in all, the IKEA Hemma proved to be a great solution for us. There are tons of really great examples out there using it as well. It allows you to be creative and still coming up with a professional look. If you have used the Hemma for a DIY lighting project, we’d love to see what you did! Leave us a comment with info and a link.

Creating a Duct Tape Chair

April 30, 2011January 12, 2011 by Jessica@SheekGeek

I purchased a dome chair from a big box store last year and it didn’t hold up very well. The chair part ripped and fell of the frame. Since the frame was still left intact, I didn’t want to throw it away -so I reused it to make a new chair. Using duct tape (the best duct tape of all – Nashua 357), I created a new frame for the chair. This project was quick, cheap, and easy; it used less than $10 in materials and only an hour of my time. The result is a chair that is much sturdier than the original I purchased.