DIY Modern Outdoor Chair | How to Build

Welcome back to Fix This Build That. Today we're going to be building a DIY outdoor chair from cedar 2x4s. The beauty of this design is it only takes a few 2x4s and a couple 1x4s, but it looks totally custom. And thinning the wood down and making some sleek tapers and angles gives the chair a killer look. I'm using cedar for the build and I'm repurposing some off-cut cedar 6x6s that I was given to get my material. I turned each 6x6 into one 2x6 and three 2x4s using my milling machines, but you don't have to do this. You can make this whole project from just cedar 2x4s and 1x4s from a local home center or a building supply store and I'll have plans to help guide you along the way. After milling all the lumber down, I started cutting the parts for the seat of the chair. The chair will have an integrated seat and a back held up by a pair of leg and armrest assemblies. I started off by making the sides and the front of the seat and I'm going to be using pocket hole joinery for the chair and the places where I can hide the holes. The legs will also be joined to the seat front with pocket screws, so I made sure to offset the screw holes in the front and the side because if you center the pocket holes on both pieces, then the screws are going to run into each other. I attached the sides to the front with two and a half inch exterior pocket screws. Now clamping the pieces down to a workpiece really helps keep the parts from moving around. The back of the seat tapers from the bottom to the top for a nice sleek look and it reclines at a 15 degree angle. I'll be using a combination of a simple tapering jig on my table saw and some angles cut on my miter saw to shape the pieces. I started off by making the long taper on the back. The taper runs from a full width bottom to a squared top. After marking the cut lines, I clamped the piece down on my tapering jig. Once it was down, I hot glued a reference block at the bottom and another one along the long edge. This gives me registration to make identical parts for my next cuts. I made the cut on this first piece and I was happy with the results, so I swapped out the pieces and ran the boards through the table saw for all my parts. That would have been smarter to put down tape on the jig and then hot glue on top of that, but I didn't and it really ripped up the surface when I took those wooden blocks off. Next, I took the parts over to the miter saw and I set the blade at 15 degrees for the base cut. I set the stop block on my fence to define the length of the back and to get repeatable cuts on the pieces. The last cut on the leg is to make the flat face that will join up with the seat sides, and don't worry, this is all going to make sense in just a second. I used the tapering jig again here and I clamped the back piece in place and then hot glued those reference blocks along the bottom and edge again. After making the cut, you can see how this is going to be able to join to the sides and give me that 15 degree recline I talked about. Using a tapering jig and a stop block on the miter saw make this process repeatable and I was really happy with the results. I cut the rails to size for the top and the bottom of the back that will join the pieces together, and while I was at it, I went ahead and cut the cleats that are going to be holding the back slats for the cushions. The rails on the top and the bottom of the back are connected with pocket holes, and again, I offset the lower rails here to make sure that they wouldn't interfere with the screws coming in from the side pieces. To assemble the back, I started by clamping the top rail in place and securing it with two and a half inch screws. It took a little bit of finesse since it's rotated at 15 degrees to match the slant of the back, but I got it in there. Now the lower rail is really easy to attach since it just sits flush with the back, and none of these screws will be visible once the chair is assembled and the cushions are in use, so I didn't bother filling them. Speaking of finesse, attaching the back really took some. Having a second set of hands here would have been pretty handy. Now you can see how the final taper cut makes a perfect size flat face for the sides to connect with. Between a face clamp and using the wedge-shaped off cuts from a taper jig, I was able to hold the pieces in place and get them secured. I finished up the parts for the seat by cutting the slats for the seat. These will hold the cushions, and they're made from one by fours. And if you're not subscribed already, go ahead and hit that button and ring that bell. I have some more outdoor projects coming soon, and you don't want to miss them. Next I moved on to making the legs. They're a simple modern design with two tapered legs connected by an armrest. The legs taper from an inch and a half at the bottom up to two inches at the top for a nice sleek look. I went back to the tapering jig for this cut. I'm using parts that are several inches longer than the final leg will be. I'll cut the miters to size later, which will define the length. I really need to make an adjustable tapering jig though, so I don't have to keep using this glue to hold down my stops and ripping up the jig. Let me know down in the comments if you want to see a video on making the tapering jig, or if there's other jigs that you'd like to make me see. I'd love to hear about it. And the chair legs join up with the armrest with a miter joint to make the side assembly. I set my miter saw to 45 degrees and set my stop block for a repeatable cut. The tapers go on the inside of the legs, so I made sure to register the small end of the leg against the stop block and the uncut edge on the fence. If you put the taper against the fence, it's really going to kind of mess things up. But using a hole down here when cutting your miters also really helps to get a clean cut. After cutting the legs to size, I grabbed the armrest blanks to cut them with a matching miter on each end. I cut one end of each armrest with a 45 degree miter, and then I set the stop block for the final length and cut the complementary miter on the other side. Just make sure to double check your setting here, because the last thing you want to do is cut the miter in the wrong direction. Now since the leg joints will be exposed on all sides, I'm going to be using hidden dowel joinery here. I matched up the miter joints on each leg, and I marked two lines across the joint. And this is where the dowels will be placed. Next, I use those layout lines to register a self-centering dowel jig on the legs and drill two holes in each leg. The jig has different size holes for each dowel size, and it's got a little alignment mark that you can line up with those pencil lines. And it makes it pretty easy. If you want to build your own chair, I do have plans with a full cut list, material sheet, and step-by-step instructions. I'll have a link down below in the description where you can go pick them up. Now the reason that you need to reinforce the miters is because end grain really sucks up glue and epoxy, just like a thirsty camel. It just absorbs right in there. So before the final assembly, I mixed up a batch of epoxy with a fast hardener, and I coated all the mitered ends. Once dried, this is going to stop the end grain from soaking up the liquid during final assembly. You can do the same thing with a mixture of glue and water as well. After the epoxy had dried, I came back for the final assembly. Now the epoxy goes on a little messy, and since it's not as easy to clean up as wood glue, I definitely recommend using some wax paper to cover your bench. I coated the end grain as well as the dowels, and I put the three parts together. Then I just applied a clamp across the entire assembly to squeeze it nice and tight and let it dry. After it dried and the legs were together, I wanted to soften the angles a bit and give it a nice rounded modern feel on the legs. I used a cap to draw an arc across each corner, and then I went to the bandsaw and I cut the bulk of the material off before sanding to the line. If you don't have a bandsaw or jigsaw though, you can just go straight to the sander since it's not a lot of wood to remove. Now like I said, epoxy leaves a mess on the joint and sanding it can really clog up regular sandpaper, but I'm using sand net sanding discs from Diablo, the sponsor of today's video. These discs have a clog reducing net design versus a normal solid paper disc. The see-through net gives all the dust in the epoxy that you're removing a place to go instead of getting stuck and gummed up on the surface. Now the 80 grit disc blasted through this epoxy quickly and got me down to bare wood. You can see this connection pad here. This lets the discs fit on any sander regardless of the hole pattern. And after using a grit, you can vacuum, rinse, or shake off the dust and reuse them up to 10 times longer than regular discs. I'll have a link in the description where you can find out more about the sand net discs, and thanks to Diablo for sponsoring this video. And next I wanted to soften the look of the chair, so I put a 3 16th of an inch round over on all the exposed edges. The router table made short work of the legs, and I used a handheld router for the base. And don't mind that blue tape on the legs, this was marking a design idea that I ended up abandoning later. While I had the router table set up, I also went ahead and rounded over all the sides of the seat and back slats as well. A router table really is worth its weight in gold when you're doing a lot of batch processing like this. And the slats are joined to the seat in the back using a couple three-quarter by three-quarter cleats that I'd cut earlier. I cut them to size, and then I drilled countersunk pilot holes in them for mounting. I used a couple slats in the seat opening to help position these cleats. And when the top of the slats were flush with the top of the seat, I clamped them in place and secured them with screws. I used the same process on the back as well. The screws attaching the slats will be exposed when the cushions are off, so I wanted them to look nice and neat. If you like to take extra time on things that will rarely, if ever, be seen, you might be a perfectionist, and I know how you feel. Now at this point I started assembling the chair, but if I had to do it again I would have applied finish at this point. And as chance would have it, I got my shot to actually do it again after a finishing fiasco I'm going to show you. So I'm going to jump around a little bit here, and I'm going to hit the finishing mishap first, show you how I messed it up and how I fixed it. Then I'll show you the assembly with a mix of footage from the pre-finished and the refinished chairs. So buckle up, enjoy the train wreck, but we have a happy ending. I wanted to use a strong spar urethane for protection on these chairs, and Total Boats sent me this matte outdoor finish for the job. It's called Lust, which is pretty weird, but at least they didn't call it moist. Though actually, that seems like a more appropriate name for a finish. Anyway, matte finishes have a lot of flatteners in them, and when they're thinned heavily and applied to thirsty raw cedar, this is what can happen. Solvents all soak in, and the flatteners are left on the top in this milky mess. I tested the finish at full strength and it looked great, but when I applied it I had thinned it without testing. So lesson learned here, always test a new finish exactly as you plan on applying it on the same material that you're going to be applying it to. But with some help from the Total Boat team, I got the solution to the issue, which was to strip this mess off and use a wood sealer first, or build coats with a full gloss, and then apply the matte finish as the final layer. They've actually amended the instructions to this product to really call this out so that others don't have the same issue, but in the end the finish was exactly what I wanted and it turned out great. Now let's jump back to three days earlier when I was prepping for assembly. I measured and made a mark on the inside of each leg where the seat base should rest. Then I propped up the leg and clamped a straight offcut across both legs and did the same for the other assembly. Next I moved to the floor and I propped up the leg on a scrap of MDF. I tipped the seat over on its side and I set it flush on the leg with the front and registered it against the board that I clamped it on. Then I clamped the seat back to the leg to hold it in place. Then I rotated up and brought in the other leg assembly to support the seat. I flushed up the front of the seat with the leg and then I clamped everything together and finally I joined it with two and a half inch pocket screws on the front to hold everything together. It's a little bit of a dance but it worked out okay. Now for the attachment to the back legs it's a little bit different. The slanted back passes right over the corner. In the earlier assembly I'd already attached the cleats for the slats so I knew where they're going to sit on the uprights. I laid out two screw locations that would be covered up by these cleats and that would go straight into the leg. So I pre-drilled and countersunk the holes making sure that I was lined up with the leg and it wouldn't blow out on the other side. Then I used two and a half inch deck screws to join the pieces together. You could also use dowels with glue here for a more permanent connection but thank goodness I didn't do that because stripping the finish when it assembled would have been like eleventy times harder. With the pieces joined I reattached the cleats and I the slats on the seat in the back. I cut some small one inch spacers and I used them to make the slat install quick and easy. Now these chairs were sized specifically for the cushions I bought and they can be easily adjusted to fit whatever cushions that you'll be using. But they look amazing and you can't beat the finish on this seater. So moist. If you want some other outdoor projects I got a playlist queued up for you right there that's got a few that I think you'll really like. If you want plans for this build I've got a link down below in the description you can check out and build your own outdoor chairs. Until next time guys get out there and build something awesome.