Learning Tower

After having a slow week, I was ready to be productive this weekend. I have a few woodworking projects I really want to do, but I decided making an IKEA hack learning tower was a good smaller project to start on. Saturday morning I went to IKEA and picked up this stool. Luckily, that has been my only cost for my project. I had some leftover wood to use from my brothers keezer project and I used screws from the person who helped me.

First thing I did was put together the stool and measure the distance from the top of it to the counter. Our counter is 36" and it was 16" from the top of the stool to the center of the granite.

We cut the 4 corner posts 1.5" x 1.5" x 16" and then routed the long edges (except the top front corner because I didn't want a gap where dirt could get trapped).

I had a mini supervisor for the first few steps of the project. Next I marked the top step of the step stool so I knew where to drill the holes for the corner posts. I used a drill press to drill through and put countersink holes. 

After that I measured, cut, marked, drilled and routed the rails.

The last thing we did on Saturday was attach the rails and attach the top back to the base of the stool. It sounds easy, but it took a while since we wanted to make sure everything was precise. 

Sunday I sanded the crap out of it. I also contemplated the many options on how I wanted to finish it. I really wanted to do a colored jade stain, but that was too expensive. Ultimately, I decided to keep it natural and just put a protective polyurethane coat on it. That will happen sometime later this week.

Audra has already used it and is a big fan!

It was fun to make and I learned a lot about woodworking in general. Quality tools make a big difference. Unfortunately, I don't always have access to them.