From School Assignment to Fire Pit Seating

This build was a long one.

Back in October, a friend’s son—let’s call him Timmy—had a school project where he needed to build something of his choosing. Two years ago, he had the same class and the same assignment… and decided he wanted to build a chess board. The only problem? I got about 48 hours’ notice.

This time, the project was due in December, so at least he gave us about two months. Progress.

Timmy’s dad (we’ll call him Bob) had also been talking about replacing the worn-out plastic chairs around their fire pit with Adirondack chairs. So Bob suggested we kill two birds with one stone: build eight Adirondack chairs, with one of them serving as Timmy’s school project.

If you’re not familiar with how these school projects work, Timmy was required to do some of the work himself, could have adult help, and we had to document the process with photos along the way.

Now, I had never built Adirondack chairs before. I remembered a YouTuber who had a video on three levels of Adirondack chairs, which sounded like a great place to start. I generally enjoy his content, but due to the quality of the “instructions” I received, I’m going to leave names out of this one.

I bought the bundle of plans covering all three levels. Bob and I decided to build the intermediate version. I reviewed the plans, figured out how many boards we needed, and Bob went shopping. I suggested cedar for its natural rot resistance and how good the grain looks under a clear coat, but since the chairs were going to be painted, Bob decided pressure-treated pine was the better fit.

Once the supplies were in, we picked a weekend to get started. Bob brought Timmy and his brother over. Timmy’s brother played with my boys while Timmy helped unload lumber, organize materials, and start breaking things down in the shop.

My approach was to work piece by piece—rip all the back legs, then front legs, then slats, and so on. Timmy was a big help. He ran the miter saw for some cuts, stacked parts by type, and even labeled everything. That turned out to be crucial, since we quickly realized we weren’t building eight chairs in a single day.

It took nearly a full day just to get all the parts ripped down.

Between work schedules, school, and sports, it took a couple of weeks before we could get back to it. When we did, we moved on to angled cuts and radius cuts—and that’s where things really started to fall apart.

What Bob and I quickly realized was that the plans were severely lacking. We had a high-level cut list and pictures of numbered parts. No written instructions. No angles. No explanations. Nothing.

Besides the frustration of paying for instructions that didn’t really exist, the bigger issue was the amount of time Bob and I spent standing around trying to figure out the designer’s intent. Timmy, understandably, got bored watching us debate and eventually wandered off to play with my boys. I can’t blame him at all.

We cut what we could confidently figure out, then called it a day so I could email for more information. While the YouTuber’s team was responsive and friendly, the additional guidance still wasn’t very helpful.

For several weeks, chair parts sat on a table in my shop while we waited another window to move forward. When we picked it back up, we started winging it. We used scrap pieces to test angles, cutting and recutting until something looked right. Once we had that, we used those scraps as templates for the real parts.

By the end of November, everything was finally cut and ready for assembly—just in time, since the project deadline was looming. Ironically, this was also when I finally received the paper templates that were supposed to come with the plans. Why they weren’t included originally is still a mystery, but at that point they were a day late and a dollar short.

Assembly took far longer than it should have, mostly because—once again—there were no assembly instructions. More standing around, more debating, and a lot of squinting at the single reference photo on the front page of the plans to guess how things were supposed to go together.

Eventually, we figured out our version of it and started assembling all eight chairs. And don’t worry—Timmy came back in to help drill holes, tighten bolts, and drive screws.

The weekend before the project was due, we had seven chairs about 90% assembled and one chair fully completed. That allowed Timmy to turn it in for school. The remaining chairs went on pause for the holidays.

This past weekend, we finally wrapped it up and finished the remaining seven chairs. Bob now has eight Adirondack chairs ready for paint, I have my shop space back, I have several templates to build more in the future, and—just in case you were wondering—Timmy earned an A+ on his project.

Projects like this are a good reminder that good plans matter, patience matters even more, and sometimes in custom woodworking you just have to figure things out as you go. Not every build follows a clean set of instructions, and real shop work often looks a lot messier than the finished product suggests. If you enjoy these behind-the-scenes stories—the lessons learned, problem-solving, and the reality of building things by hand—stick around. I’ll keep sharing what I’m learning along the way.