Building Furniture, Slowly But Surely

by admin | January 16, 2026 7:54 am

I started building furniture as a hobby in 1998, concentrating on Mission-style pieces, first popularized by Gustav Stickley in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The name came from furniture he saw in Spanish California missions and emulated in his work — simple, clean lines in contrast to the overly ornate (in my view) furniture of the Victorian era. Stickley later popularized Craftsman furniture, which is considered more carefully proportioned. Both styles still hold broad appeal. Mission style is considered a subset of Craftsman furniture.

As with most hobbies, I went whole-hog for a few years, cranking out a dining room set for daughter Kasey with six chairs and a couple of leaves, a bookshelf for daughter Mere, and a Prairie sofa for myself, on which I napped for years, the desk on which I write, to name a few pieces.

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When I started, I had a rudimentary understanding of basic carpentry, thanks to my dad. Since YouTube was not yet a thing, I turned to woodworking magazines and a dozen or so books to learn, through trial and plenty of errors. There were a few close calls with the table saw and one trip to the emergency room to get a splinter removed from my eye. (I now always wear safety glasses.) I still have about four linear feet of magazines stowed in the shop but quit subscribing long ago. Those dusty magazines contain enough furniture plans to last several lifetimes.

Early on, I managed to acquire a trailer load of black walnut lumber along with a full-sized, used lathe. When I wrote columns about building furniture, folks began contacting me, offering to sell lumber stored in barns and shed across East Texas. I still have a large cache in my shop, enough to complete any project that catches my imagination. I turned some chair legs on the lathe and built a wooden mallet that I still have. Then one day, a piece of wood shattered while I was turning it, impaling me in my chest. It was a minor wound but convinced me that the lathe and I needed to part ways. One does not need a lathe to build Mission-style furniture.

Eventually, I ran out of family members for whom to build pieces and did not really need anything else for our house. When we bought Three Geese Farm in 2021, my attention shifted to working on the property — bushhogging, cutting up tree limbs, etc. Still, I usually work on one woodworking project a year. I have never built anything to sell and have no intention of doing so. I do not need another deadline to meet.

The latest project was a large ottoman for the living room, built in Mission style to match the other furniture. It is 36 inches square and consists of about 70 separate pieces, all planed from rough-cut black walnut and joined with mortise-and-tenons. There are no nails or screws involved, just joinery and wood glue.

The ottoman, pictured here, has finally arrived in our living room. It replaces one made of fake leather that largely fell apart, the victim of a decade’s worth of cat claws. I finished building the ottoman — sanding and finishing it (that takes the longest) early last summer after working on it sporadically for nearly a year. We took it to a local upholsterer, selected fabric, and waited. And waited some more. After six months and an unpleasant visit to the shop manager, where my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I both played Bad Cops, the cushion was completed. The upholsterer did an excellent job, but six months is a bit much. We will look elsewhere for any future projects that require upholstery.

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The next furniture project involves transforming a single slap of black walnut, about 3 inches thick and 18 inches in length, into a vanity for my BMC. I am shopping online for metal legs with an appealing design and plan to add a single drawer beneath to store the type of items women use when getting gussied up. This will not require as much work as the ottoman.

Still, there is no hurry to get the vanity completed. It is nice to have one aspect of my life that does not have a deadline.

Source URL: https://garyborders.com/pages/building-furniture-slowly-but-surely/

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