Farmhouse Bench

Do you know how much dining room chairs cost? Take that number and then multiply it by 12. What do you get? A very large number. A number that’s well beyond our means.

When I first started considering to build a dining room table, I researched how expensive dining room chairs would be to go along with our table. I was pretty shocked when I found that all the chairs that we liked ranged between $70 to $100 a piece. Our goal was to have the ability to seat 12 comfortably and so that total cost quickly shot up to $840 to $1200. Wowsa!

With the high cost of dining room chairs in mind, I needed to pick out a table design that I could also incorporate into a bench design to decrease the total number of chairs that we would need to buy. That was one of the big criteria in choosing the farmhouse design from the get-go. Once again, I came across the idea/inspiration/building plan from ana-white.com. Here’s the building plan; http://ana-white.com/2011/01/farmhouse-bench

Unfortunately, I was so wrapped up in all of these building projects that I didn’t take any during pictures. My apologies. The bench was a very similar process to the Farmhouse Table, found here.

I started with the 4x4”s that were going to become the legs of the bench. They were leftovers from the 8’ lengths that I used to build the dining room table. I cut them down to 16.5” and began to notch them out. To do this, I set my table saw blade to a height of 1.5”, I ran them through the table saw making my first cut at 3.5” from the bottom, my second cut at 7” from the bottom, and then a bunch of tiny subsequent cuts anywhere in between that range. I then hammered out the little slivers and swirled it all around the table saw to smooth it out.