Sometimes, you have to laugh at yourself even if you try super hard. Morgan had seen these really awesome looking chairs on Overstock.com and wanted something exactly like them for our new dining table. Then, she saw some old school desks at Goodwill and had a vision. So she bought the desks and brought them home for me to create perfection.
That was when I realized that I had no way of attaching the angled plates to the seat itself. The seats had four total screws already sticking out of the bottom for when they were attached to the metal desk structure. Each of the angled plates had four screws by themselves. Looking back at what I did here was extremely ghetto and I’m ashamed I tried it. I cut four small pieces of wooden boards and attached the angled plates to them. I then drilled holes into the center of the piece of wood and screwed it onto the seat.
This was a fail, but then I had the brilliant idea of actually looking at a picture of the seats Morgan wanted and trying to emulate what they did. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. I noticed that they had cut slits in the top of the wooden legs and there were brackets connecting them to the bottom of the chair.
After cutting the wooden legs to the appropriate lengths, I put a double sided screw into one end and screwed it into the angled plates. Voila!… it looked like crap and I don’t even think the cat could have sat on it.
So I went back to Lowe’s to return the angled plates and buy some angled brackets. I found the right brackets and knew this was going to work. I also needed a way to brace the legs together so they wouldn’t all go in their own direction when you sat down, so I grabbed some 12″ mending plates that Morgan thought would look fine and we could paint black, just like the Overstock chairs.
I came home and sawed slits into my table legs and attached the brackets. Then I attached the brackets to the chair’s screws.
Perfect. Everything is going well. I then attached the mending plates to the four legs and they all seem pretty sturdy and don’t seem to be moving.
Still perfect. It looks pretty good and I’m happy and ready to sit down…
W.T.F. I really don’t know why these brackets didn’t hold up. I’m not sure what happened and why they bent, but I got super depressed at this point. After two different strategies for putting this chair together, I threw in the towel. Morgan and I decided to use the money from her grandmother that we got for Christmas to buy the original chairs from Overstock.com that we liked so much.
I’m still not sure why this didn’t work and the one’s from Overstock look the same and did work, but oh well. We lost the initial investment of the desks, but we returned everything else and got the well-crafted, professionally-made chairs for a Christmas present. They look great and we’re really happy! (The kitchen table is from Ikea and is a fairly recent purchase that we just assembled once we got these chairs!)
Be brave- Tell us about your last DIY fail!
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Hey there, I’m Sean, the woodworking enthusiast and builder behind CharlestonCrafted.com! Since 2012, I’ve been sharing the magic of turning raw materials into beautiful creations. I love teaching others the art and satisfaction of woodworking and DIY. I try to inspire fellow crafters to make something extraordinary out of nothing at all.