This bench was a gift for someone for Christmas in 2019. His apartment is small and he had nowhere to store his shoes or sit to put them on. So I designed and made this bench. I sketched out what I wanted and made a cut list as I do with all my projects and then started building. I really wanted to do finger joints to attach the seat to the side boards. Apparently people usually use jigs for this kind of thing but I just drew what I wanted and cut it out very carefully on my vertical bandsaw.

The first dry assembly to check the finger joints. There were some gaps in the joints but I filled it with a mixture of sawdust from the wood I cut and wood glue. Now nobody will ever know.

The first complete assembly with all the components. They all fit really well considering at this point I didn’t have a drill press and had to try to drill a straight line through 3 pieces of wood with a hand drill.

I chose the same stain as I used for the coat rack I made because it looks great and honestly I only have 2 stains. I decided just to stain the top of the seat and the dowels. I then painted the rest for contrast.

I sealed it with oil-based polyurethane to give the soft wood a fighting chance against shoes and pant buttons and zippers.

So shiny! At this point I was getting really excited about seeing the final product.

After the polyurethane dried completely, I taped off the dowels and seat so I could prime the rest of the wood with a white paint primer.

I decided to also put newspaper down to completely cover the seat and dowels because I didn’t want to get any paint on anything that wasn’t supposed to have paint on it.

Although a bit hard to see, the finger joints turned out great. I painted the side boards an ash grey and stained the sides of the fingers on the seat the walnut brown. The contrast looks really nice from the side.

The finished bench! It holds 3 pairs of shoes on the dowels and another 3 pairs underneath. The part sticking out was done so that any tall footwear such as boots would have a place to sit too.