I wanted to clean up the bedside area — a stylish little side table.
The cardboard storage box that had been doing the job until now was completely beat up, and I’d been pretending not to notice. Time to fix that with a DIY build.
Plan and lumber
The sad state of the existing bedside box
The photo below is the box I’d been using as a bedside catch-all.
Years of use, finally torn — every time I looked at it, my self-esteem dropped a notch.
To fix this, I’m going to build a proper wooden bedside table.
Going for “stylish”
I want this one to actually look good. Two specific commitments for this build:
1. Slim, tapered legs
DIY tables tend to end up with chunky legs, which gives the result that “homemade-from-2x4s” look. I’m tapering the legs to keep them looking refined.
2. Use hardwood
Lumber broadly splits into softwoods (conifer) and hardwoods (broadleaf).
Softwoods (cedar, hinoki cypress, pine) are easy to work with and cheap, so they dominate hobby DIY.
Hardwoods (oak, ash, maple) are denser and heavier, harder to work with — but the grain and surface look much nicer, and the result is durable. Hardwoods are what you find in higher-end furniture.
This piece is small, so going hardwood wasn’t going to blow up the budget.
Total lumber cost ended up at 9,400 yen (breakdown below).
Lumber
Hardwood drove the cost up a bit, but the finished look fully justified it.
I ordered the lumber online from Marutoku Shop.
Even if you don’t know where to start with hardwoods, they have photos and descriptions that make it easier to choose. (I’m still learning here too.)
I went with birch (Japanese name “kabazakura” — literally “birch cherry,” though it’s not cherry).
The top is a solid (single-piece) board, and the rest is glulam (edge-glued panels). Sizes and prices below ↓
American birch, solid 11×250×400 mm 2,680 yen
Birch glulam 20×210×360 mm 1,990 yen
Birch glulam 20×60×900 mm 2,260 yen
Birch glulam 20×60×1,100 mm 1,370 yen
Shipping 1,100 yen
Total 9,400 yen
Finished result
Done. Sized to hold a tissue box plus a few small items.
(In hindsight I could have made the storage compartment a touch bigger…)
Here’s how it came together.
Working the lumber
Cutting
I cut the lumber to size with a circular saw.
The four legs have to be the exact same length or the table will rock, so I worked extra carefully on those.
Trick: cutting boards to identical lengths with a circular saw
Set up a stop block as in the photo, butt each board against the stop, and cut. Same length every time.
The legs all came out the same length (next photo).
The other parts went through the same circular-saw treatment.
I tapered the legs so they’re slimmer at the foot than at the top.
Slim legs were a key goal!
Out of the saw, the leg edges are still square. To soften them, I rounded the edges with a palm router.
Having a palm router on hand really does take a DIY piece up a notch.
You can absolutely round edges by hand with sandpaper, but it takes forever.
[Update] At the time I didn’t own one, but I’m now using a Kyocera (formerly Ryobi) palm router.
I bought it based on online reviews and it’s been a comfortable tool to use.
Mount a roundover bit in the router and run it down the leg’s edges.
Looking good — except for one mistake!
I’d run the roundover all the way to the very top of the leg, which meant once the table was assembled there was an unwanted gap visible at the top of each leg (next photo).
Done is done — I’ll fill those gaps with wood filler later.
Lucky to have caught it on the first leg, at least. (Always positive thinking, that’s me.)
All four legs roundovered.
Joinery — using biscuits
Cutting biscuit slots
For the panel-to-panel joints, I’m using biscuits. (First time using them, actually.)
Biscuits are little compressed-beech tabs shaped (yes) like biscuits.
The joint is stronger than dowel joinery, and they self-locate, so alignment is much easier.
The catch is that the standard tool — a dedicated biscuit joiner — runs around 30,000 yen, which had kept me away from this technique up to now.
Doing biscuits without a biscuit joiner — substitute a palm router
I’d heard you can cut biscuit slots with a palm router and a special slot-cutting bit, instead of a dedicated joiner — so I tried it.
I bought a biscuit-joint bit with the right slot profile.
The bit comes with three interchangeable bearings, so you can cut slots for three different biscuit sizes.
I used the smallest, #0.
Mount it in the router and mill a slot.
Slot cut, and the biscuit fits snugly.
Mill matching slots in the mating board, then dry-fit.
Snug fit. Substituting a palm router for a biscuit joiner worked.
Next is glue-up — but first, a small detour to thin part of the bottom panel.
Detour: thinning part of the bottom panel
I want a small interior storage compartment.
Thing is, I’d designed the compartment a bit too shallow, and a tissue box wouldn’t fit standing up.
To recover, I’m thinning the bottom panel locally — just under where the tissue box will sit.
That’s the left-hand area in the photo.
I made many shallow passes with the circular saw to slice the area into thin strips, then chiseled the strips out with a wood chisel.
Then sand smooth.
Not flawless, but this surface won’t be visible from outside, so this is fine.
Glue-up
Apply Titebond to the biscuit slots and glue everything up.
(You should clamp during glue-up. Some of my joints were longer than my clamps could span, so on those joints I just skipped the clamping pressure…)
Wipe up squeeze-out and let it cure.
(At this point I caught Covid, so the project paused for about two weeks…)
Touch-ups: more roundovers, and filler
Adding the inner-edge roundovers
Looking at the legs after they were dry, the inner edges still being square started bothering me — so I went back and roundovered all four sides of each leg.
Roundover added.
Yes — much nicer.
The transition where the new roundover starts (next photo) didn’t blend smoothly into the existing surface, so I had to clean that up.
Knocked the step down with a coarse rasp first, then refined with sandpaper.
Smooth blend now.
Filling the gaps
For the gaps left at the joints (from running the leg roundover too far up), I used wood filler.
Process: [pack filler in → let cure → sand flush]
I used a wood-grade epoxy putty.
Take just enough putty for the job and knead the two parts together. ※ Wear nitrile gloves.
Press it into the gaps.
For the narrow gaps, I masked off the surrounding wood with painter’s tape first to keep filler from smearing onto surfaces it shouldn’t be on.
Pull the masking, let the filler cure.
Final sanding will happen later as part of the whole-piece prep, so I’m leaving the filler proud for now.
Working the top
The top needs an oblong slot for pulling tissues through. I’ll route it.
To keep the cut clean and to a precise shape, I made a template from MDF first and used that as a router pattern.
What’s MDF, you ask? In February 2023, the talked-about new tool “ChatGPT” gave me this answer:
“MDF stands for Medium-Density Fiberboard, also called fiber-core panel. It’s used for furniture and building materials. It’s high-density, easy to work, and has a flat, uniform surface.”
Cut the MDF template’s slot with a jigsaw.
Template slot cut.
Sand the template’s slot edges smooth, then fix the template to the actual top.
Routing through 11 mm of solid wood in one go is asking a lot of the bit, so to reduce load on the router I drilled out the bulk of the waste with a power drill first.
Smug nod from me. “Bit by bit, planning ahead, smart” — I thought, briefly…
…until I flipped the panel over and saw the back side.
Massive blowout. Yikes.
Pretending I didn’t see that for now (questionable choice), I went on with the routing.
Used the MDF template as the router pattern.
Routing went fine. (From the front side, anyway.)
And the back side still looks like this ↓ — sand it down to make the worst of it presentable.
Not perfect, but this is the underside of the lid — calling it good enough.
How could I have avoided the back-side blowout?
The drill blew out the back of the panel pretty badly.
What should I have done? One trick: clamp a sacrificial backer board behind the workpiece before drilling — drilling through into the backer board prevents the back face of the workpiece from blowing out.
(There may be other better techniques — still learning.)
Finishing with Briwax
Sand thoroughly before finishing — don’t skip this. Sanding is what makes the finish come out clean.
Grits used: #120 → #240 → #400.
(Higher number = finer grit. #240 alone is also fine.)
Up to now I’d been using Watco oil for everything, but for this project I’m trying Briwax.
“Briwax / Antique Brown” (toluene-free).
It’s called “wax,” but it’s really a penetrating finish that soaks into the wood and stains it — same general category as Watco oil.
The instructions say to apply with steel wool, but I don’t have any (laughs), so I just used a rag and worked it into the surface.
After application, I buffed it with a kitchen sponge.
Final step was to keep wiping with a clean rag until the rag stopped picking up color. ← This is the trick to preventing the finish from rubbing off onto your clothes or other things later.
Color came out really nicely, I think.
Briwax dries faster than Watco oil, so if you want to finish a piece quickly, Briwax is the shorter route.
Hinges and final touches
I want the lid to lift open, so I’m fitting hinges.
Tape the hinges in position with painter’s tape, drill pilot holes, drive the screws.
Hinges installed.
But left as-is, the lid would swing all the way open and flop, so I added a stay (stop hardware).
Picked up this little hardware piece at the home center:
One end screws to the underside of the lid, the other to the inside of the body. Lid stays put at the open angle now.
Done!!
The slim, tapered legs gave the look I wanted — the piece reads as more refined than a typical hobby-DIY table.
And honestly: hardwood just looks better.
Personally satisfying bedside table.
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