Matching Pair of Personalised Bedside Tables (nightstands) From Reclaimed Oak

How I built a pair of rather special, custom bedside tables for my daughter and her partner.

NB - for anyone in the US, you might call these nightstands. We call them bedside tables in the UK.

This build was satisfying as it combined user-centred design, cabinet making, some handy electrics and lots of fun making a pair of cool pieces of furniture, for two of my favourite people. I enjoyed the challenge of designing and creating them to be unique. For this, I created integrated touch-dimmable LED lamps built in in the shape of the owners' initials! It was also good to used reclaimed wood. All the wood was salvaged from discarded, but good-quality old furniture.

Each table has:

1. the table top itself with
2. a personalised monogrammed inset (with integral lamp)
3. a rear guard to stop things falling down the back (with additional lamp)
4. an integrated dimmer control for adjusting the brightness of the lamps
5. a drawer for storing bedside nick-knacks
6. a main tall alcove shelf for slightly larger things that need to be to hand when in bed
7. a further handy shelf for separately keeping a book (the owners are avid readers)
8. a side panel with
9. twin mains sockets for powering devices
10. twin USB-C sockets for overnight charging of phones

The challenges here included:

1. how I took a particular cursory request from my daughter and turned it into reality
2. how I developed the design to get a decent table that was functional, but also personalised
3. taking requirements and expanding out the things that weren't asked for, but would be needed
4. using reclaimed wood from old furniture
5. incorporating electrical features:
6. mains power for devices
7. dimmable integrated LED lights set in bespoke resin inserts
8. building a matching pair, with individual detail

Reclaimed Materials

I always like to make use of reclaimed wood. There is so much good material that is discarded, when it can be simply made into something new and exciting. It's definitely worth keeping an eye out for old furniture. I have pieces of wood that I've kept in the shed for years before finding a good use for them

I'm pleased to say all the wood in this build was salvaged from reclaimed wood - here are the four sources

Reclaimed oak from an old futon base

(modern, from Futon Company)

The rails (apart from the two very wide rails), the legs of the main frame, and the front and side rails of the top surface were all made from this wood

I had kept these after acquiring an old futon for free off Freecycle (a website for giving away things you don't need to someone who can use them) a year or so ago.

I originally only needed the padded cushions for revamping our garden swing seat. The oak base had been hanging about forlornly, in the garden ever since. I knew it would come in handy for something one day, and so it did.

Various old oak shelves from a vintage bookcase

(mid-20th century, probably 1940s, 50s or 60s)

The wide rails, the drawer fronts, the table top panels, and the backguard for the top were all made from these solid old oak shelves.

5mm plywood and thin hardwood planks from a vintage chest of drawers

(also mid-20th century)

The drawer rails were made from the original drawer side rails. These are a pale yellowy-white hardwood. I don't actually know what type. It might be birch, but I can't be sure. They are quite soft and have a distinctive smell.

The thin infill panelling was made from the thin hardwood ply from the back panels of the chest cabinet.

8mm plywood salvaged from a skip (dumpster). [EDIT - add pics)

(modern)

The shelves, the inner lining of the side panels and the drawer bottoms were made from sturdy 8mm plywood. Originally these were part of packing cases, used to contain wood burners during transit. They are quite rough, but more than amply strong enough for the fairly small panels used here. These added strength and were thick enough to cut deep enough recesses in for tracing the hidden electrical cabling.

Here are some close ups of the finished tables. The basic frame is all held together by glued joints only - no screws, nails etc. The oak I gathered was lovely. It is lightish in these photos as the wood was relatively recently sawn. Over time it will darken with exposure to light. The grain will become more prominent as it does.

The personalised lights (e.g. the big E in the photo here) are lamps, made from LED stript lights set in epoxy resin within wood recesses. See later steps for how this was done. I also deliberately chose a different light wood for the drawer side walls, so the dovetails would be more prominent in the side of the drawer when open.

The black sockets are powered by 240V AC mains, fed from a kettle lead socket. They have USB-C chargers built in.

The driver for this build, was a request from my daughter for a pair of bedside tables.

The ask was pretty brief (see WhatsApp message thread in the pics)

1. helpfully specific details about the required size
2. the basic functional features needed like having a draw and a shelf.
3. It was also handily vague about the aesthetics: "..two nice bedside tables.." This was good - I like to have a bit of space to play with the design.

To work up the design, I did what I pretty much always do, which is to draw a few ideas out on paper to see what might appear out of the imagination. To help, between drawings I detoured a few of my daily walks round places where I might get ideas (e.g. I looked at display case cabinets in the Oxford Natural History Museum).

Ideas pondered but ultimately rejected.

I toyed with two variations on the aesthetic that I eventually rejected.

1. One was to make the whole cabinet a bit curvilinear, like a late nineteenth century Art Nouveau vibe (looked cool, but required too much wood and a lot more effort.
2. Another was to make the top slightly octagonal, which I was tempted by, but it meant there would be a bit of restriction of usable space in the cabinet.

Ideas pondered and ultimately implemented in one way or another

1. I decide it needed to be personalised and that some sort of inlaid monogram letters would be cool. This did get incorporated. I wanted the finished tables to be completely unique
2. Bedside tables are used in the dark, so I decided to add some low-level lighting, so that it would be easy to find things like your book, or your phone
3. In the end, I combined 1 and 2 to make some rather cool personalised built-in lamps, that lit:
4. from the back to provide functional lighting that shone down slightly onto the surface of the tabletop
5. the monogram lettering, which added a bit more light, but mainly was just there because I could - to be funny and make you laugh every time you used it
6. I added a dimmer with memory of last light level setting, so that you could turn the light on really low if needed (to avoid disturbing the other person)
7. Both my daughter and her boyfriend read (a LOT!) so I added an extra dedicated book shelf, for convenience when night-time reading. The shelf size was thin enough take a small book-only amount of storage space, but tall enough to fit a hefty book. In fact it is 6cm tall, which was based on being able to fit the thickest Harry Potter book (The order of the Phoenix), which is about 5.3cm thick
8. Also, everyone uses devices in bed and sometimes you need power (for charging laptops, iPads, lamps, hairdryers, reading lamps, whatever), so I added an integrated double mains power socket.
9. Also everyone has a phone, so the sockets have USB-C phone charging sockets built in too

The wood from the old futon was some nice oak. The pieces had been hanging about in the garden for about a year. It was a bit stained, but actually quite sound. The tables are quite small, so the legs and rails needed to be quite thin so they didn't feel too chunky proportionately. This allowed me to get lots of pieces out of the salvaged wood.

The first thing then was to create two sets of component pieces to match my rather cobbled plan for how the basic frame would fit together as a cabinet. I put the rails through the planer to take off the surface patina, then ripped down pieces to the approximate width and height of all the pieces needed, before running them through to thickness them all.

With the various parts, I ran all the rails through together in batches (so lots of rails all going through at the same time). They were not very wide, so I could them to go through together easily . The advantage was that as each set was run through all rails in a batch had the exact same thickness setting.

The frame consisted of four legs (25mm x 25mm or 1" x 1") with several levels of thinner rails (15mm by 18mm), all joined together with good old mortice and tenons. There were various rebates (recesses) cut to house plywoods sheets for side panels and shelves.

Mortice and tenon joints

Mortices

All the mortices were cut using the router table. This makes it fairly easy to get a consistent depth of cut for multiple holes on many rails. Of course, the router uses a rotary cutter so the basic mortice is circular on each end (see pic). I squared the mortice holes by hand with a mortice chisel.

Tenons - thin rails

Mots of the rails in the tables were thin rails. For these rails, I cut all the tenons on the table router. These were simple tenons with no shoulders (that is, only cut on two sides, not four sides). I cut the tenons for sets of rails for each frame by clamping all the rails together (see pic). This has the advantage of making the depth of cut identical as they are cut together. It also reduces the risk of edge feathering when the router bit cuts through at the edge of a tenon (well, at least for the rails that are not on the outside of the clamped set).

Tenons - wide rails

Each table had two wide rails at the top (because on one side the rail needed to mount the electrical socket). For these temons, I added shoulders top and bottom. Shouldered tenons are much stronger and prevent shearing of the joint. I cut these using a tenon saw, as it was easier and the router can get a bit rough for precision cutting (see pic).

The corners of the tenons were also mitred so that when two tenons met inside two adjacent mortices, they would fit together.

Rebate joints

Open rebates - for shelves

The rebates in the rails for sitting the shelves in were fairly easy to cut on the table router, as they were open on one side. The depth of cutting these was set to the thickness of the plywood sheets I was using, about 8mm. This meant that the upper (visible) shelve face was flush with the rail edge

Enclosed rebates - for the side panels

The side panels were made from much thiner plywood (~4mm). The rebates for these were much more delicate and were enclosed on both sides. This meant that when constructing the frame, the panels were locked into the sides of the frames, as the rail tenons were fitted.

With all the pieces cut, I did several dry assemblies without glue to check all the joints fitted snugly together, befor committing to glueing. This is strongly recommended. When I did this, it showed up a few things that needed trimming, such as the corners of the enclosed side panels.. It also allowed me to cut the mitres on the tenons where they met at corners in each leg. I cut the mitres using a narrow belt sander (9mm). It is easy to file off just a tiny bit until they fitted perfectly (well, nearly perfectly).

The drawers are especially sturdy with thick 20mm thick oak planks for the front and back pieces. They are this thick to allow a decent chunk of wood to cut the joints into, so they would be strong enough for years of use. These were originally thick oak shelves from a mid-20th century book case - solid!

For the side rails, I used wood that had also been used for side rails from a separate reclaimed 20th century chest of drawers.

Drawer joints

There are no screws or nails used in the drawer corner joints. I used sturdy traditional half-blind dovetail joints. The rails are held firmly in place by the angled dovetails to stop the drawer fronts being pulled off from repeated pulling open.

But because the half blind dovetail is not cut all the way through, the front of the drawer remains a single clean plank and so you can't see the join from the front when closed, for aesthetic reasons.

Mind you, I like the look of dovetails, and when a drawer is open, the shape is visible. The contrast between the sturdy oak front planks and the lighter side rails is especially pleasing.

Drawer bottom

The drawer base piece is 5mm plywood. It is set in recesses for strength. The front recesses are cut into the oak planks. The side recesses are cut into additional mini-rails, as the side rails are too narrow to cut a recess into. These rails were from the original drawers.

Assembly using corner cramps

The little blue 90 degree clamps are cheap to buy, but amazingly good at holding the joints in true, while the glue set - well worth investing in. About £12, I think

Handles

The handles are solid oak. These are simple rectangles with the corners rounded. For ergonomics, they use a generously deep recess cut in the underside, so that you can comfortably get all four fingers in them (and my fingers are quite stubby). I rounded off all the internal corners. There are very comfy on the fingers. These were attached using two screws, tightened from the inside. Oak is a strong wood, so the screw holes needed to be countersunk to house the screw heads neatly. Oak also does split quite easily in small pieces, so I took care to drill pilot holes.

The table tops are nice and chunky and once they were glued, pretty solid. This part was the most complex design challenge and also the most complicated to build.

Tabletop basic frame - a tray to hold all the bits

Each table top is essentially like a tray, with four containing rails and a plywood bottom. The rails are about 40mm high with 8mm ply, so that they form a 32mm deep open box. To form the "tray" the plywood was attached to the frame with a screw into the top of the legs at each corner. Then the rails were assembled round it to form the shallow tray shape.

The most difficult thing in making this was installing the LED lighting strip without breaking it, into wooden recesses, . On each table, the finished top has two lights. One is set into a long thin recess in the backboard that forms the rear edge of the table top. The other is set in resin that surrounds the central personalised initial.

On each. table, there is a continuous LED lighting strip that loops round inside the backboard rebate, then threads through an exit hole and then loops round the wooden letter

Fitting the LEDs into the backboard

The backboard LED had to be fitted first, as the backboard is part of the containing frame of the table top. It is higher than the rest of the rails so that in the finished table, it rises above the level of the table top, to stop things being pushed off the back of the table.

The LED strip was fixed by hand into the rebate in the backboard, using a hot glue gun. This was threaded through a hole in the board and out to feed the other light, later. Once in place, more hot glue was used to form a dam round the rebate, before pouring in casting-grade clear epoxy resin.

Once the epoxy was set (about 48 hours later), the hot glue dam was chiselled off and the resin was sanded back to make it flush with the wooden face of the backboard. The resin is transparent. The sanding makes it appear semi-translucent. It actually had a lot of sanding down using progressively finer grains, and eventually using steel wool.

Joining the rail edges of the table top

The edges of the rails have some of the most complicated joints. the two fro coner joints are mitred blind mortise and tenons. Essentially a mitre joint with a concealed mortice and tenon inside to add a lot more strength. I cut the angle-edged tenons by hand using a small tenon saw and chisels. They were only about 5mm thick and I cut the mortices using a drill and micro-router bit using a handheld Dremel (a small type of high-speed rotary tool). They were tricky.

The back two corner joints were also blind mitred mortice and tenon joints, but were even more complicated as the mitre was not cut to the rear edge. There is a slight thickness of backboard before the mitre.

The rails also had rebates on the lower edges, to fit the plywood base.

Once the joints were all cut, I glued them to the base sheet of plywood. This was fiddly as the LED strip light was still hanging off the backboard. I had to be careful not to damage it.

Building the personalised letter frame

The letters were cut from a solid plank of oak, which was then glued and screwed onto the plywood sheet. To do this, I had to unscrew the glued table top tray-frame, to attach the screws from below. The small surrounding frame was a simple mitred square of tiny rails. I just glued these on.

Fitting the LEDs into the table top letter-shaped lamp

Once the glue of the frame was dry, I threaded the trailing length of LED lighting strip inside the frame and looping it right round, I glued it in place to each inner edge, again with hot glue. This was even more fiddly.

Finally, once the LEDs were in place, I again poured casting-grade epoxy resin into the frame. First I sealed any gaps in the frame joints to stop the liquid resin oozing out. I also used hot glue as a dam here.

Fitting the panelling round the letter-shaped lamp

The central decorative lamps are surrounded by simple plank panels, to fill in the rest of the surface. These were glued in place with the same epoxy resin as the lamps. Epoxy is tough and forms a strong bond. It acts both as glue and joint sealant.

Sanding the separate pieces to produce a single level surface

Once set, again I sanded the wood and resin level. I did the main levelling using a belt sander, before sanding smooth using progressively finer grit sandpapers on a standard square orbital finishing sander. The grits ranged from 60, 80, 120, 240, 600. I used fine steel wool for the final finish. This gives a smoother polished feel than sandpaper does.

Fitting the electrical components in the tables was quite complicated.

How I built the LED lamps is described above. The left-hand picture here shows all the electrical parts that make them work. It was taken before the epoxy resign was cast.

The LEDs needed a 12V supply, so I used a standard 240V AC to 12V DC converting transformer - designed for use with LED lighting strips. This was powered from a 240V connector block, which had a 2.5mm mains cable back to the power socket and a separate cable to the black output double socket. The LEDs were also wired up to a touch dimmable switch fitted into a side rail.

The 2.5mm cable was routed via the side panels. This was done by gluing in an internal facing 8mm plywood panel onto the inner face of the external 4mm facing panel. This was housed in a rebate cut into the slightly thicker inner plywood panel (see drawing for details of how this can be achieved).

The photo of this shows (not very well), the trailing grey 240V 2.5mm mains cable sticking out as the . All the clamps are there to hold the inner panels in place while the glue drys.

The shots of the finished tables in situ show the integrated lights in action at night. In one shot, you can also see a bedside lamp that can be conveniently plugged into one of the sockets if required.

The tables needed a good range of woodworking joints. Here you can see photos of the finished joints against some sketches of how the jointed parts work. I've only drawn sketches for the main complex ones:

Blind mortice and tenon joints (rails to legs)

The main cabinet frame is very strong. It is built from four legs, with three sets of rails that are connected to the legs at 90 degrees with mortice and tenons. The mortices are blind with stub tenons, so that the ends of the tenons are hidden inside the legs. Where tenons meet at 90 degrees in a leg, the tenon ends are mitred, so they meet flush diagonally inside the pairs of mortices. The tenons were half shouldered, which just means they were cut only on the two vertical sides, not the top and bottom. This was to give the maximum wood for additional rebates cut into the lengths of them.

Rebate joints (shelves to rails)

Most rails have rebates on their upper inside faces, within which shelves sit. The extreme lower rails that form the mouth of the drawer opening didn't need rebates.

Rebate joints (panels within side walls)

For the rails on the two sides of the tables, there are additional slender rebates in the middle of the rails, which when assembled encase the edges of the side panels locking them into place.

Rebate joints (shelves within wide rails)

The outer sides of the upper shelf sits in a full rebate within the centre of the much wider top side-rails.

Mitred joints with blind mortice and tenons (table top corners)

The rails of the top of the tables are mitred for aesthetic reasons. I built these with blind mortice and tenons inside for strength. Simple butt-jointed mitres would have only been as strong as the glue, whereas these have some inherent structural strength in addition to the glue.

Mitered butt joints (decorative casing on table top lights)

Within the face of the table tops, the decorative LED lights are set within small rails, that are simply butt jointed. They were cut to match and then just glued face-to-face, to form a square casing, into which epoxy resign was poured, to encase the LED lighting strip.

90 degree mitred joints (fill-in plank panels on table top)

Round the central decorative lamps are simple plank panels, to fill in the spaces. These were simply glued in place with epoxy resin.

Materials

I like to build things from found materials.

Wood - all the wood was reclaimed

1. main cabinet
2. frame (legs, rails, top and backguard) was from solid oak (from a futon base)
3. table top - oak (from futon base and vintage oak shelves)
4. internal panelling from reclaimed plywood (from packing cases)
5. shelves (plywood as above)
6. drawer
7. front/back - solid oak planks (vintage shelves as above)
8. side - unknown hardwood
9. drawer bottoms - reclaimed plywood as above
10. handles - solid oak

Other materials - most I had to buy new

1. electrical sockets -
2. twin mains 240V (UK) with integrated twin USB-C sockets
3. 2.5mm copper cable (mains) - leftover piecs from other jobs
4. Input kettle lead socket (female)
5. angled kettle leads (male plugs) - one right hand, one left hand
6. lamps
7. lights used under-cabinet trimmable 12V LED strips
8. power - 240V AC to 12V DC transformer (standard for LED lights)
9. dimmer - touch-controlled dimmer switch with locating blue LED
10. clear Epoxy resin - infilling routed recesses for lamps
11. Wood glue (Evostick outdoor PVA)
12. Acrylic laqueur (spray) - sealing wood, mainly plywood boards
13. Polyurethane varnish (silk) - final wood finish
14. Sandpaper (multiple grades from 80 to 1200 grit)
15. Fine wire wool - finishing timber and surfaces between varnish coats

Tools

Timber preparation

1. Table saw - ripping down oak pieces into rails, legs etc.
2. Planer thicknesser - dimensioning the ripped wood to consistent accuracy, trueing, finishing
3. Trying plane (hand) - some trimming of pieces and trying up of pieces
4. Circular saw (hand) - cutting plywood, trimming, offcutting
5. Various electric sanders (orbital) - finishing surfaces, especially plywood boards that can't be planed

Making the cabinet frame

1. Router table - recessing and cutting mortices, some tenon cutting
2. Mortice chisels - fine cutting of mortices, trimming tenons, dovetails etc
3. Mallet - for use with chisels, knock pieces together and apart, as required while testing joint fits
4. Tenon saw - cutting tenons, dovetails
5. Filing sander - shaping pieces, fine trimming, rounding
6. Jigsaw - cutting rounded pieces
7. Belt sander - shaping, especially rounded corners

Electrical work

1. Long nose pliers
2. Wire strippers (pliers)
3. Soldering iron/solder
4. Side cutters
5. Electrical screwdrivers
6. Gluegun - for fixing components in place (e.g. LED strip lamps before setting in resin)
7. Driver - for miscellaneous screws used to fix down transformers, connection blocks etc