Last winter I suddenly decided I wanted to work with wood and build things. At the top of my list of things I wanted to build was Adirondack chairs. While family members shrugged this off as I wasn’t exactly “Little Miss Build It” yet, but I knew I could figure it out.

After playing with power tools for a few months, I finally convinced my husband to take a trip with me to buy some cedar wood. I suppose you could use a different kind of wood, but I wanted something that would be great for years and years to come. 

I found an Adirondack chair plan online at wiltontool.com, which happened to have a shopping list. The cost of the wood for two chairs was roughly $136.

Not long into my project, I realized that the plan I was following was very vague and hard to follow. I made templates the best I could, traced them onto my boards, and then cut the boards, first to size with a chop saw, and then to shape with a jigsaw.

 

After the cutting was done, it was time to sand down the rough boards. In the future, I will definitely splurge on the smooth boards to save a week and a half of sanding.

After the long and tedious chore of sanding, I was finally time to start assembly!

This is where the problems began! Although I followed the plan as best I could, the pieces would not fit together! A half inch off here, a quarter inch off here, it was maddening. I ended up recutting quite a few boards to make them fit together correctly, and then of course I had to sand the edges again. Once I was sure the piece would fit, I traced it so that I would have new templates that would work in the future. 

After all of the effort, I’m really quite pleased in how everything turned out! Would you ever try to build your own Adirondacks? Would you be interested if I made a post with my plan?