Slat Wall Part 4: The Bench

And now onto our final installment on the slat wall installation! The wall was done but to maximize storage and have a sitting space to put shoes on (and, sadly, to leave clutter on), we needed a bench. D was originally planning on something involving plywood with Forbo (basically, a fancier linoleum, available in lots of fun colors, on top of plywood), but backed off when he realized that the Forbo itself was the cost of the plywood (essentially doubling the cost) and applying it would be troublesome. He asked the lumber store if they could find sapele plywood (the same type of wood as the slats). They said no, but they could make it themselves, by purchasing a giant roll of sapele veneer and gluing it to plywood (with big machines that make it look much nicer than we could do). So, we went with that. 

We ordered enough  to build the entire bench out of the sapele, including the doors. We had not actually settled on a bench design when we ordered all the wood, which was risky, so we made sure to order with enough buffer to design as we went. The design came from a bunch of constraints:

1. No nails or screws
2. No exposed plywood edges
3. Buildable by D, who is not a fine furniture maker
4. Sliding doors (swinging doors could interfere with our front door), which also would require flush hardware
5. At least four sections--one for each person's shoes

D never modeled the entire design in Fusion360, his CNC design software. He only used it for the side panels, door "handles," and doors, cut from the CNC machine. The rest he cut by hand with the track saw. 

The sides were the most intricate part (shown below in the digital model):

The lower slot is for the plywood floor of the bench (we wanted it a few inches off the ground for easier cleaning underneath). The high slot for the top of the bench. The tiny holes are for the pins to hold interior shelves. Here it is for real:

Test fitting the lower slot on the plywood:

The top and bottom sheets of plywood needed to be trimmed (to cover the not-so-attractive inside). The easy thing would be to glue some veneer on - but we wanted to avoid doing that because the veneer would eventually peel and chip. Also any hard hits on the edge would result in the veneer cracking. So instead D cut a 3/4 inch wide strip of sapele for the entire length. Which was pretty fiddly to do with the track saw. Here are two pieces of plywood: the lower one has the sapele hardwood edge glued (and clamped) on. The top board, just to the right of the clamp, is still awaiting the edge. 

Done:

Now for the terrifying step where D CNC'ed out dados (those lines) for the internal dividers. Somehow he didn't mess it up.

Now it was ready for test fitting:

You can see that the bench is designed to have three sections. Also that this project is straining the limits of our bike garage / workshop.

D just used glue and clamps to attach the side panels and top/bottom panels.

Afte glueing both sides on, the internal dividers were cut out and slotted in (again being held with wood glue). At this point it was sturdy(ish) enough to be carried into the house for the finishing steps. It definitely was wiggly.

D made the sliding door mechanism by cutting slots in the top and bottom of the bench and installing nylon washers into the door. The washers were screwed into the back of the door with a lot of measuring and hope.

Two doors installed! The door "handles" were slotted with the CNC into the edge/finishing pieces of the doors. 

The last steps involved a fair amount of hand cutting to cover all of the exposed plywood edges with sapele strips. 

D would say that some parts show his .... not so fabulous precision (which he did say, in a draft of this post). J would say it looks amazing and no one would ever notice these things in our beautiful finished bench. Wood glue + sapele sawdust was periodically used to fill in some spots.

But at a normal viewing distance it looks pretty nice! (Again, D's words. J thinks it looks professional and amazing.)

Without further ado, the final product (which we actually shared back in December for our not-actually-500th post):

We use the left and right boxes for our regular shoes (one shelf each) and the middle box for tall boots, with no dividing shelf in the middle. Do the kids leave their shoes on the floor? Absolutely! And their coats and other junk on the bench, rather than the hooks? Yup! But we do get a pretty amazing built-in room divider and a place to quickly throw things before guests come over.

Slat Wall Part 3: Coat Hooks

With the slat wall in place and looking fabulous, it was time to make it practical beyond just being a room divider. One of the original reasons for the wall was to create a nice-looking/integrated space to hang coats. So it was time to add hooks.

Step one was figuring out our ideal placement and hook heights. We wanted to make sure that the kids could reach the coat hooks (spoiler alert: now that it is installed, we still find coats and hoodies on the floor and have to call the kids back to hang them up). We also wanted to fit in as many as we could without everything feeling too crowded. We opted for a pattern of a hook every three spaces, at alternating heights. For stability and looks, we decided to put spacers in every space, rather than just those that held a hook, so practically this meant a pattern of three high, three low. 

Having decided on the pattern in theory, we had to pick our actual hook heights. This was easier with an actual hook to practice on. Clamps, apparently, make great hooks, if  a little ugly:

We also had to decide on the design of the hooks themselves. Loving the IKEA hooks we installed in our stairwell in 2010 (yup 2010, and long-since discontinued), we wanted hooks that could open and close. As D wanted them to be inset into the wood spacers, the hook also would work better if they already had a frame around the hook. We settled on these from Amazon, which were reasonably priced but have an annoying icon on the hooks for "press here."

After picking out the hooks themselves, it was time to decide how they would be integrated into the slat wall, D's CNC machine could cut hollows into wood, and he really wanted the hooks to be flush. So with the hook measurements in hand, he made many prototype boxes (in cheap pine and other scrap woods, rather than the actual mahogony) for them and eventually got a size that let the hooks be press-fit in and matched the correct space between the slats.

Also we had to procure some VERY shallow length screws to secure them into the little box spacers as the depth of the hook was only a little bit less than the wood itself. (Even though they were snug enough for press-fitting, they still needed hardware to be securely held in place.)

Once we had the optimized designs, then the CNC machine churned out 39 boxes.

Before even starting to put up the wall itself, we had decided how to attach the boxes, because we knew then that if we wanted to use screws or nails, they would have to go in as each slat was going up. That would have significantly complicated construction (especially if you wanted to hide the screw heads). Plus we were not sure what height(s) the hook should be at, before installation.

We decided that wood glue was strong enough - and they could be installed after wall construction. Cue the clamps again.

Of course anything that requires precise measuring also means the lasers get to come out again too.

One strange thing about our Bosch laser is that it doesn't come with any way to mount the laser on a tripod. So D had to jury-rig the laser with a clipboard and a kettlebell on the (now gone) Expedit to get the height exactly right.

After several weeks of (un)steady work all the spacers and hooks were installed!

The wall is MUCH steadier now. This left "just" the bench to be designed and built! Stay tuned for our next installment.

Slat Wall Part 2: Measuring and Building

The implementation of the slat wall was rather scary. Wood is expensive (nice wood gets priced by the foot) and because it is expensive (and we do not have a storage warehouse handy in our house) we bought only 20% more than we thought was necessary. Which meant that making a lot of mistakes could result in running out of wood. Which came from a specialty lumber yard, so we could not just pick up more from Home Depot.

Also the ceiling of the living room is one of the (few) areas in the house that we have not painted. So mistakes in installation that damage the ceiling (paint) would cause even more downstream costs and disruption. Fun.

The design is quite simple. Board on top, with dados (channels) cut through. Matching board on bottom with dados. Attach vertical boards in the channels and voila! Easy, right?

The dados were cut by our CNC machine. Since "0.75 inches" in the computer is not necessarily 0.75 in reality, the first spacer boards were cut in the same pine we prototyped the wall in. It took a few iterations to get the width correct. 

This gave us another chance to check out the 2:1 spacing with the actual boards. It seemed OK, so we proceeded by cutting the spacers for real.

Now that we were close to the real installation, we had another problem: finding a ceiling joist. Ideally we wanted the slat wall to be anchored into a structural part of the house. But this part of the house is extra fun because the walls and ceiling are plaster. With metal mesh in the plaster. So the technique of using a magnet to find drywall screws is useless. In fact a magnet sticks to most of the ceiling. A stud finder does not find anything either. Since we wanted the slat wall as close to the door as possible that also limited the placement. We...never found the joist. Instead we used drywall anchors and cut the vertical boards as close to flush as we could manage to provide a little bit of tension.

Here we go--point of no return!

The first board, on the ceiling, aligned using fancy lasers:

You can see how most of the boards are the perfect height. Clamps and scrap wood were around to keep the boards from falling out.

As we installed each vertical board, sometimes we had to fit them  into different slots than the one we intended (as being off by a mm was noticeable). But since the living room height dropped between the front door and the rest of the room (yay old houses...), cutting a board too short just meant we used it closer the dining room.

The cross line laser level was crucial to getting the slat wall plumb. Especially as the room is very not plumb. In fact the height from one end to the other...is not the same (which is why we never even considered building it as one unit in the garage and moving it in). These two pictures are about a couple of feet apart (2421 vs. 2427 mm). Each vertical board had to be custom-cut to match.

We decided to place the slat wall in between the switch plate and window as putting it to the left of the switch plate would take up a lot of valuable living room space. You can see how the slat wall is not in alignment with the vertical window trim. Because of the laser we know the slat wall is perfectly straight.

Once we got the first pair of ceiling and floor spacers installed, the slats went up at a fairly quick pace.

The last detail was figuring out how to trim around the ceiling and floor spacers. We could not leave it un-trimmed as the boards are just held in by tension (or not at all if they were a little short).  

It would have been easiest to use a "fat trim." Also the most secure. But this would create a major issue with upkeep as dust, pet hair, etc. would accumulate in the bottom and be really hard to clean out. 

So we did the fiddly thing and ripped boards (meaning sheered off some of the width instead of using the whole 3" board) to match the thickness of the ceiling and floor spacers. It was surprisingly difficult to get the trim attached. D used a nail gun to hold the trim up and the wood was so dense (or his technique so poor) that the nails frequently failed to go all the way through the board and he had to hand nail them flush. Plus there was a bit of waviness and the trim wasn't 100% even with the boards. One major fun part of working in wood is that you cannot just slap some caulk and paint in to cover imperfections. Still, we ended up with lovely mitered corners and top and bottom trim at the same height as the spacers (meaning an even plane to dust, rather than something with a dust-catching well):

Then it was onto the next major phase - installing hooks! But that's a story for next time.

Slat Wall Part 1: Prep Work

I think we're at an all-time low for our "before" picture--I had to get a couple screen grabs from an old video for photographic evidence of the way this part of the living room has looked for literally over a decade: piano, torchiere floor lamp, messy coat rack:

For years D has wanted to get the piano off of that wall. It is the "entryway" and really seemed like a bad place for the piano, not to mention the fact that it was right up against our baseboard heating, which was bad both for the piano and for allowing the heat to get into the house. Plus we really needed more storage.  Creating some kind of wall would help us be able to get rid of that tippy, cluttered coat rack without losing all the coat storage. We had an IKEA Expedit behind the sofa (see this older picture, used a few times already including here):

But this only gave us a few cubbies, especially because we deliberately left some cubes open to avoid making the entry way too dark.

We debated a few options:

1. Pony wall (waist high free standing drywall)
2. Different furniture
1. More and bigger IKEA Expedit (now called Kallax)
2. IKEA Pax
3. Vitsoe 606
3. Slat wall

The pony wall was dropped fairly quickly as they are fairly deep (since you need 2x4 + drywall) and not very functional. The more/bigger Expedit / Kallax was dropped as it doesn't allow for hanging clothes. Pax (wardrobe) would create a fairly deep literal wall and would take away a lot of space and light. The Vitsoe 606 is quite expensive (though they seem to hold 100% of their value) and we thought it could give more of a "did we just enter a SoHo clothing store" vibe? 

That left a slat wall, which had the advantages of taking very little space, allowing for light to filter, and giving some flexibility on how / where to hang coats. The major disadvantage being that it would need to be custom-built. 

But before really starting several important questions needed to be answered: dimensions of the wood, the spacing of the slats, and what kind of wood. First, D did a lot of measuring and then some mock-ups with cheap pine, mostly to convince himself (and me) that it was not crazy. Here's the entry view with the initial framing (all press fit, i.e. just held in place with friction) in place for what the space was potentially going to become. 

With the project given the green light (by me), the piano found its new home in the sun room, which really is a much better home for it:

Then we moved our Expedit against the now-empty piano wall (and, cats being cats, this guy had to inspect the area fist):

And now, with the space behind the love seat empty, the project could begin. D continued to use the pine boards for more testing and measuring. We tried a few different variations for the spacing of the boards to get a sense of what we liked. We ended up deciding on roughly a 2:1 opening-to-slat ratio.

D also worked with a few lumber yards and settled on a couple options to consider for our final product. He ordered samples of sapele ("African") mahogany (bottom, the redder/warmer one) and American walnut (top) to see what matched our existing furniture and space:

Hopefully you can see in addition to comparing the wood color itself, we tested how it would look stained/oiled. The left/lower side of each board shows each wood with Danish Oil on it, and the right/upper part shows it completely bare.

We decided on the warmer, redder sapele as the existing cabinets in the kitchen and living room had some of those hues. We ordered quarter-sawn S4S (finished on all sides) 1x6 boards. We paid them to rip most of the 1x6 boards in half to create 1x3 as doing it ourselves would have been annoying. 

And just like that, we were ready to begin...