How to Start Making Your Own Furniture: 7 Hot Tips for Beginners

How to Start Making Your Own Furniture: 7 Hot Tips for Beginners. © 2022 | Shreya Teresita

When I first started toying with the idea of building my own furniture, there was a lot of push back from friends and family. There would be an incessant tirade about how I’d for sure end up losing a limb, or an eye, or at least finger if I messed around with tools and materials I had no business handling.

Cut to two years later, they now ask me to build them stuff. That, or they want me to guide them in their own DIY furniture-making drive.

I’m in no way a professional, or even a seasoned artist for that matter. What I am is self-taught. Everything I have learned so far about woodworking came from hours of research, closely following professionals and a stream of endless trial and error. I learned from every novice mistake, and I always found a way to fix them.

So, while I cannot impart sage advice like Master Oogway, I can share with you my own tips and tricks of how to get started with furniture-making with no prior experiences or skills:

1. Start small

This one goes without saying. If you’ve never build a piece of furniture or done any woodworking before, don’t start with a colossal project, like a bed. A big project will not only leave you overwhelmed, but will also put you at the risk of making bigger mistakes, losing more money and even hurting yourself.

Your first few projects should be small, like a simple shelf or a tissue holder, so that they can act as your practice routine for something much more challenging.

If it helps, think of the scene from Titanic where Jack makes Rose practice swinging an axe before breaking him out of his cuffs.

2. Follow a model

Once you have some experience under your belt, you can make your own designs to follow. But when you’re still a new kid on the woodworking block, follow a map.

YouTube and Pinterest is filled with brilliant guides on how to make simple furniture for starters. There are also many websites dedicated to this subject, where you can find something you like and recreate it.

You can also follow yours truly for such user and newbie-friendly tutorials J.

3. Don’t invest too much money

If anyone tells you to sink a boatload of your savings into buying all kinds of fancy stuff for DIY woodworking, run. Run like Forest Gump, run like Milkha!

Having been around that block, I can assure you that woodworking does not essentially have to be an expensive task. There are one too many pocket-friendly substitutes and hacks one can get by.

As a beginner, it’s even better to start off with cheaper alternatives. This will not only give you the room to make mistakes without incurring too big a loss, but will also give you the leeway to practice and find out if you even enjoy the art. For instance, start off with plywood instead of real and expensive wood.

#HotWoodworkingTip: You can cut out the whole deal of sawing if you just go to a store that sells pre-cut or custom-cut wood. Do figure out your measurements before you go, though.

4. Learn with easier tools first

Let’s say you can and want to buy all fancy tools and supplies you can get your hands on, does that mean you should? I’d say start small and see where it takes you.

If you end up loving the work, you can always expand your toolkit. But when you’re just starting out, you first need to find your bearings. So, start off with simpler machines and raw materials that can help you learn how to tame the wilder ones.

Ideally, in my opinion, your furniture-making starter-kit should include:

• A hacksaw for sawing the wood. It does require some elbow grease, but it’s a much-cheaper alternative (around Rs 500 online) and way more forgiving than an electric wood cutter or a jigsaw.
  

• Some screws and nails, which you can buy piece-wise or weight-wise from any hardware store near you. The one-inch ones generally cost around Re 1 apiece.
  

• A drill machine. An electric one would cost you anywhere between Rs 1,000 and above, whereas a manual hand drill is somewhere around Rs 500.
  

• A small pack of wood stain and varnish. I find painting furniture a much more long-winding process that staining.

Read more: Should you DIY or Buy? The Wisdom to Know the Difference

5. Leave room for error

Learning a new skill takes time, especially when it’s a handiwork like building your own furniture. You will have to train yourself to use tools that are not very forgiving, put in more elbow grease than any video will ever be honest about, and you’ll have to measure you’re sending a rocket to Mars.

So, go in knowing that you will make mistakes. Cut an extra inch or so to accommodate any error in measurement, make cardboard models first to ensure how realistic the design is, use glue before sealing the deal with nails or screws, and always keep putty handy.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be careful in the first place, but from what I have learned, no matter how careful you are, it’s only natural to make mistakes as a beginner because you probably won’t foresee it.

See these corner shelves here? Looks so simple, right? It had reduced me to bawling like a three-year-old, because no matter how precisely I cut it, the shelves were just not sitting right. It was only when my flatmate intervened that we figured out the problem – I was cutting the wood at a 90-degree angle for a corner wall that folder at a 109-degree angle. Go figure.

Building this corner shelf has its own story. © 2022 | Shreya Teresita

6. Focus on utility instead of looks

I’m a sucker for home décor. Honestly, I might even be little on the vain side when it comes to making my home look gorgeous. But beauty in interior decoration should work in tandem with utility.

When you’re just getting started with furniture-building, it’s better to focus on one priority instead of getting frazzled with too many goals. And that one priority should ideally be the utilitarian side of things.

If you are making a planter box, for example, concentrate on making sure that the insides are big enough for your plants, that it is water-proof, that the drainage holes are in the right places, etc. Your first few projects are likely to be a little rough around the edges (unless, of course, you’re someone who’s born with a golden touch). But at the end of the day, if it is serving the purpose it is meant for, it’s worth it.

7. Prioritize safety

All things said and done, if you have to take home one lesson from this blog, please let it be the importance of safety.

Woodworking involves the usage of tools and materials that can be very dangerous if not handled carefully. So, don’t skimp on protective gears like safety glasses, wood clamps, proper masks, etc. Headphones are good too to protect your ears from the loud noise and wood dust, but don’t listen to anything too interesting that can take your attention away from the project.

And please never use tool, especially power tools, in an inebriated or sleep-deprived state.

If done carefully, building a piece of furniture can actually be a fun weekend project or even penny-saving hobby you’d want to pursue more seriously. These few tips can help you navigate your way through the initial days, before you become the dragon master yourself!