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.

A High Bar for 500

 Dear reader,

Believe it or not--and honestly *I* don't even believe it--this is the 500th post to this blog. I did not think, when we bought this house back in September 2009 (with our first post technically before closing, in August of that year), that we'd be going this long. There have been long gaps of inactivity and I'm still not caught up with everything we accomplished in 2024 during the almost year-long set of projects that began with the new addition and ended with upgrades to pretty much every bedroom in the house, but here we are, nearing the end of 2025 with 16 years of posts and, apparently, at number 500.

So it was a lot of pressure figuring out what to say! There's still plenty to write about, what with still being behind. But it felt like this post had to be different somehow. Rather than go into excruciating detail about one of the few big projects remaining to be shared, I wanted to cut to the good part and share a few amazing "after" pictures, leaving most of the in-between for later. Both are sort of an ode to D (ew, I know, emotion, gross) as he's combined his knack for fixing things with his newish hobby of carpentry into something that has transformed our house--and would have cost quite a bit of money if we had hired someone else to do it. Without further ado...

For the room that used to be the nursery, started with this:

Here it is, a quick "in-between" picture without the IKEA Stuva units, just so you can appreciate and compare the full space itself:

to THIS! Built-in closets and customs shelving, all by D (with a little help from his brother on the trim):

Our growing kid now has her own actual closet, instead of just some free-standing drawers...Again, much more to come on the "how D did it" later.

And the second big reveal, since it feels like 500 warrants more than just one, is for our entryway.

Our "before" picture actually comes from before we enclosed the sunroom, but besides that door in the background and the swapped out rug, this is pretty much what this space looked like until the beginning of 2025:

to...

ready?

It's a dramatic shift so I feel like I have to build some suspense...

...

...

...

THIS:

D designed and built a custom slat wall and matching storage bench. 

I told you it was pretty impressive. 

Here's the view from the other side where you can see the cool way it casts shadows on the ceiling, the built-in two-level hooks, and our pretty new loveseat (details later):

In looking back on these 16 years of homeownership, I would say we have upped our game (really, D has upped his game--I'm just here to cut in and edge on the painting and provide input on color and design). 

Here's to 500 more posts (or, at least, a few upcoming posts that go into more details on these two projects)!