How To Build Rustic Furniture At Home

Making rustic furniture is probably one of the easy types of furniture to make because you don’t have to worry about making everything look neat and tidy in fact it’s the complete opposite. I like to build rustic furniture out of reclaimed railway sleepers. It can take a lot of work planning them down and sanding them but in the end its worth it. 

Lets take a dining table on eBay for instance that sells for $1000 this could easily be made of material you probably have in your home or garden already, if not just go to a reclaimed timber yard and buy a few railway sleepers you will also need some power tolls such as a belt sander and electric planer. 

Start of by planning the railway sleepers down I personally like to take off around 7mm to get them looking more less like brand new but still keeping that reclaimed feel.

Now that you have everything planed down and all even its time to build, this is very easy just join the 4 of the same size railway sleepers together and use 4 for the legs, and there you go that’s a rustic dining table. 

You can add treatment or paint it using farmhouse paints and buy a buffer for your drill and polish it either way that table would have cost less than £50 to make and it will last for around 200 years before you start to see rot, then just take another few millimetres of the surfaces and re-treat. 

It does not just have to be dining tables you make you can make all kinds of furniture but the idea is to keep it looking aged and chunky and most importantly heavy. I have made wardrobes , chairs, benches, chests, garden planters all from reclaimed railway sleepers. You should try it you cant go wrong the worse you do the more rustic it looks, everything always s feels, tastes, smells better when you make it. If you make a piece of furniture which lasts you a lifetime you have really achieved something in life, not many carpentry companies who have been in business 20 years can make long lasting furniture like the old days.The best way to learn how to build rustic furniture at home is to try it and learn from your mistakes most companies try and cut corners when making rustic furniture you don’t need to cut corners instead of using metal screws or bolts to join the wood together use chucks, like broom stick handles, drill the female role a 3mm smaller than the chuck, then hammer the broom stick “male chuck” into the female hole this will give you professional joints and extremely strong and long lasting, the are very hard to UN-do so the idea is to build it once and leave it.