Entry Bench & Shelf Walkthrough | NelsoncraftTX

Hi everyone Kyle Nelson, again this time I'm going to show you how to make an

entry

way

bench

and shoe rack. Normally you would make something like this with plywood, but I was honestly tired of making things with plywood and I want to do it. I use real wood so what you see me doing here is drilling some pocket holes and the edges of the board will act as clamps when I put the boards together since I didn't have any big three foot clamps here I'm just checking the alignment, placing the board placed and beginning to spread the glue.

I'm not going to show this process every time I did it for this project because, to be honest, it was about ten times, so if it doesn't help, I'll show it. Ten times, for the smaller panels I had big enough clamps, but for the back of this project it's about four feet wide, so I didn't have the massive clamps needed for that, which is why I decided to use the Kreg jig. The bottom of this project will be a shoe

bench

and we wanted to make some adjustable shelves so instead of buying a

shelf

pin jig I decided to make one first.

I took a piece of oak that was cut to the exact height of my side of the

shelf

and simply drew a straight line down the middle and marked every three inches spacing it out enough to make it look good to my eyes. Next, I drilled a hole that is the exact diameter of the shelf pins I bought down to the quarter inch that Think about it, but you can get them anywhere from an eighth of an inch up to 3/8 of an inch now on the outside edges of this. I didn't want the holes to go all the way through, so all I did was put a piece of blue tape on my drill bit to act as a visual depth stop, you can see here.

I stop just as the tape starts to hit the shelf. Now that it's done, I take my actual shelves and square them on the table saw, cutting them down to a rough cut. the length first and then I trimmed them on the other side once I had a ruler now before I put this together I wanted to sand it just to avoid having to get into all the little nooks and crannies it makes a big difference to the I guess I could have sanded this too , but it's a lot more fun to use manual brushes, so I took out the number five, knocked down some of those edges and cleaned it up a bit.

The next step was to assemble the cakes on the bottom. part of the shelf I just put the screws in the pocket holes I had drilled and put them together and that will be pretty strong for the top. We wanted to make a shelf to display things or just to put random baskets on, so that's What we're going to do next now here I start designing the top shelf that will be attached to the big back part that we made before, it will be put together with holes for the pockets again and it will come together that way too.

I have learned that sometimes it is easier to hold the pieces when you are putting them together and sometimes it is not. I'm just letting gravity do the work for me on this project and one of these days I'll finally clean out all those boxes behind me, but until then I'll just work in a tight space once I get the top shelf in place. I just cleaned up the edges, there was a little bit of overhang, I got a smoothed plane and I just knocked down the edges on the top of the shelf too now that I put this together.

I wasn't sure if they were going to stain it or paint it so I used the actual plugs in case I was going to stain it rear facing. I should have used wood filler to cover these holes as we ended up painting it for a really good video on how to cover pocket holes in the different methods, check out how to fix this compilation. I'll link the video in the description. It was very helpful for me on this build. The final step before finishing this project was to make a mock board and batten on the back.

I made this with some small two and a half inch wide sections of poplar that I bought at Home Depot, glued them together and nailed them together. I can't explain how helpful it was to have a battery operated nail. Nailer on this project and made it much easier than having to get out the air compressor. I put the horizontal pieces in first and then cut the vertical pieces to fit. It was actually very easy to line them up because the left and right pieces just sat down. on the outside edge and the middle piece placed right on my glue line right in the middle so it worked great, something you don't see in this video is that the nails are actually too long.

I didn't really take it into account. for that i had to go back and buff all the nails sticking out of the back with a dremel tool, it wasn't a big deal just added about ten minutes but it's definitely something to think about is getting the nail length right afterwards of that. It was done, all I had to do was put hooks on it and paint it. Now I didn't record that because watching paint dry is no fun. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I know the client did it and so did I. See you next. time