I was asked to create a small two tier plant stand. You may be asking yourself: “what the heck is a plant stand, and why would anyone want one”. To be hones, this one is purely decorative in nature. The plant will reside on a table/dresser and instead of sitting directly on the surface it will be elevated slightly.
Finished Picture
This isn’t the plant that will be used, but you get the idea
YouTube Video
I walk through the process and some of the mistakes I made during the build. I feel like the mistakes came from me “winging it” without plans or a sketch.
Materials
I started with some ash lumber. I rough cut it down to ~12 inches and started milling and gluing pieces together. At the end of that I had two blanks for the “legs” and two panels for the circles.
Cutting Circles
I have never had to cut a “good” circle before and had to figure out a method for doing so. Since I have a pretty wide blade on my bandsaw, I ruled that out and decided to use my table saw. I figured I could add some holes in my crosscut sled to act as pivot points. I spaced them every inch and they are 1/4 holes.
Then I could drill a corresponding 1/4 hole in the bottom of each piece and use a short dowel to act as the pivot pin.
Seemed simple enough. The first circle I cut was all done on the table saw. Starting by cutting off big chunks and then smaller chunks and then able to slowly spin the the board to get a clean circle. I wasn’t a fan of the big chunks falling near the saw blade. So, for the second circle I cut a majority of the waste on the bandsaw then moved over to the table saw.
Legs/Risers/Feet/Spacers
Whatever you want to call them, I had to make something to elevate the lower tier off the dresser and then something to elevate the second tier off the first tier. Honestly, this is where my lack of planning really shined bright. I decided to make the legs about 1 1/2″ long and with 4 tapered sides. After a lot of time and work, they looked like crap. They were not proportional at all and looked dumb. I also spent a lot of time aligning dowel holes and doing other stuff that had to be scrapped when I scrapped the original legs. Oh yeah, I also added big chamfer on the bottom of each tier to mimic the taper, which also screwed up the leg alignment.
Try #2
The next set of legs were much shorter (~3/4″) and wider with a gentle radius that matched the circular shape. I was able to use the previously drilled dowel holes on the bottom side of each tier, but not the holes drilled on the top surface of the bottom tier (good luck following that one)
Glue and Sand
Once I was satisfied enough with the new legs I gave everything a good sand up to 220 and glued the legs to the bottom of each tier. I added glue to the surface of each leg as well as the dowel. I let them dry over a few hours in the clamps and was ready to apply some finish.
Staining and Poly
After doing some sample boards, I decided on a nice color that matched the “inspiration” picture. So, I slapped on the stain and that is when my next big mistake popped up. When doing my sample boards I would quickly apply stain to very small area and wipe it off. Well when I did these larger pieces I applied the stain and noticed it was drying super fast and absorbing like crazy. Come to find out, I chose water based stain and wasn’t following the instructions. I was applying like oil based where you just slather it on, let it soak, wipe it off. Totally wrong technique and basically ruined them.
I had to sand all of the finish off and start again.
Staining and Poly #2 (plus assembly)
I used some oil based stain the second time and all went well. I let that dry for a couple of days and came back with two coats of water based poly, that I sprayed on.
After the second coat of poly was dry, I applied some paste wax and buffed that off.
The last step was to assemble this thing. My original plan was to use dowels and not permanently attach the two tiers together. Well with the leg mishap, I had to change course. I decided I would screw the two tiers together from the bottom. I aligned everything so I covered up my dowel mistakes and clamped it up. The I flipped the whole thing over and drilled and drove 2″ screws.
More Finished Pictures
