Ta det lite lugn

Two years is a long time to carry a chair around in your head.

I first saw it during a long hospital stay - something our family did not choose and could not shorten, the kind of situation you cannot fix, only get through.

Woodworking videos became what I watched in the hours in between, and one lounge chair stuck. I promised myself I would build it once that stretch was behind us, we had a house, and I had a workshop.

This is how that went.

The Glenn#

The chair is the Glenn lounge chair by Shaun Boyd. The curves, the angles, the style. It looked spectacular - and yet it is just wood, with every step somewhat understandable.

Those videos were not the only thing that came out of that time. I also wrote a handful of small Python tools in the same period, for much the same reason: a small, self-contained task with a clear end. The chair was the version of that idea I could not act on yet.

From Idea to Chair#

Once my workshop was set up, it wasn't very sophisticated from a woodworker's perspective. But it was enough to get started. And since I had had this chair in my head for around two years, I decided it was time to actually start the project.

Idea gathering#

I found several lounge chairs online. One was from Hornbach by Sigurd Larsen, which even came with all the material and a construction plan. But the style didn't fully match the Glenn, which was my benchmark.

I then stumbled across a simpler version of the Glenn on Instructables. It was created before there was an official build guide by Shaun Boyd. This was promising.

Another chair I found was a very simple-looking one by Maker Gray. But this one was too far off the Glenn.

These chairs all gave me the confidence to start my own plan. I knew I wanted the spectacular angles from the Glenn but not all of its round corners.

The round corners look great, but being the second real woodworking project I tackled - the first was the workbench I built the chair on - I decided to go for the simpler straight lines.

3D Model#

One common thing YouTubers tend to do is to create a 3D model. Since I have a 3D printer, this was a no-brainer for me. I created various drafts, and since I could print out scaled models of the chair, I got a feel for how it would look in real life.

The model helped me refine the design and adapt the dimensions to the material I could get here in Austria. It avoided problems that would otherwise have come up mid-build: a few smaller design changes were necessary, but after those the build was doable.

The 3D model had another benefit: printable templates. Templates make it easy to cut the various pieces of the chair to the exact dimensions without even measuring once. Given the complicated angles and the lack of a miter saw, this was crucial for me when working with a circular saw.

They were printed in pieces, since my printer's bed is not large enough, and connected with dovetails - but that went smoothly anyway. Finally, I printed a scale model of the chair so I could always have a look at it while building. It was so precise that I could even take measurements off it for the real thing.

The build#

The build started with buying the right material. The chair was going to live outside, so it needed something that could take the weather: Douglas fir.

This is where the 3D model came in handy again: I could adjust some dimensions to fit the available lengths exactly, avoiding unnecessary waste - especially since I did not care whether the seat was 55 cm or 60 cm wide.

I had initially planned to use boards for the seat and backrest. But because of the way I wanted to build the chair, they would not have been sturdy enough. So I redesigned and figured: Why not use the same frame timber for the entire chair?

That made the shopping list refreshingly short: Each chair needs 12 m of timber, available in 3 m long pieces at about 13 € each - so roughly 52 € of wood per chair. The waste comes to about 30 cm, or around 2.5% of the total.

I wasn't sure how best to make the joints. Of course every YouTuber has a Domino machine, which is very expensive.

Dowels were the budget option: around 8 € for a set of 150, plus 20 € for the jig that drills the holes straight. Then I stumbled across a cheap biscuit joiner for 50 €, with a hundred size-20 biscuits for another 12 €.

So twice the price of the dowel route. But a biscuit joint is stronger and much faster to align, and the machine would still be useful on whatever I built next. That settled it.

Here are the steps I followed while building the chair:

1. Use the 3D-printed templates to mark and cut the pieces.
2. Label each piece so you know where it goes.
3. Biscuit time: Connect the seat and backrest frames, and the legs with the armrests. Here I had to be a bit creative to clamp the various angles together so that the wood glue could dry properly.
4. Compare all pieces from the left side to their counterparts on the right side. This is the best time for adjustments.
5. Cut the desired angles at each end of the seat frame.
6. Sand. Then sand again. This was the task I had never imagined would be the most time-consuming. Run a router over the edges too, so they match everywhere - in hindsight, both jobs are easier before the glue-up. This is where I understood what people mean when they call sanding meditative: hours of it, and not one of them wasted.
7. The wedding, as I called it: Connect the armrest/leg assemblies to the seat frame. I couldn't figure out a good way to use the biscuit joiner here, so I went old-school with screws and wood glue. This is the most difficult part of the build, as the left and right sides have to match to create a square chair.
8. The easy cuts follow now: The 55 cm wide seat and backrest pieces. Again, the router and the sanding dominate this part as these pieces are way easier to adapt now than later.
9. Mount the freshly cut pieces: Here I deliberately chose screws and wood glue to fix them to the frame. This could have been done with biscuits, but since I had already used screws at the wedding, the barrier to using more of them was low. Biscuits would have been the tidier solution, and a little stronger.
10. Final sanding. Ensure that everything is as smooth as possible - especially the parts that are touched a lot, like the armrests.
11. Apply some oil to give the wood further protection from the environment.

And this is what those steps looked like, from the first clamped joints to the sanded chair waiting for its oil:

The result#

Multiple evenings spread over a month, and somewhere between 10 and 15 hours of actual work later, the chair turned out better than I had hoped. I was surprised how much I liked the straight edges compared to the round ones from the original Glenn.

Since it is not the Glenn, I gave it a name that fits: The Lugn, Swedish for calm. The idea was sparked at a time when I needed some calm, and building it gave me exactly that. Compared to programming, woodworking is great because you always see results quickly.

The oil did more than protect the wood: it turned the pale Douglas fir a warm amber.

The first one turned out well enough that I not only built a second, but a matching table as well. That came to ten pieces of timber in total - eight for the two chairs, two for the table - or around 130 € of wood. Spread across three pieces of furniture, the 50 € biscuit joiner stopped feeling like a purchase I had to justify. The table top is a tile left over from the house construction.

Since then, the chairs have served plenty of hours of quiet and laughter on the terrace, usually with a coffee within reach.

What I would do differently#

Three things I will carry into the next build:

• Take the sanding seriously. It takes forever and ranks as the least exciting part of the whole build, but it is the part you feel every single time you sit down. Doing it properly is worth the hours.
• Cut precisely. A few of my cuts were slightly off, and every one of them made the joining harder later. An imprecise cut does not stay a small problem.
• Look at the wood before you cut it. The two sides of a board are rarely equally nice. Deciding up front which face ends up visible and which one disappears into a joint costs a minute and saves a lot of regret.

Final Thoughts#

Woodworking is fun. I like how you have - like in programming - hundreds of possibilities to solve the same problem. It was also a bigger challenge than expected, mostly in the preparation and the problem-solving.

In the end, I am glad that I followed through with an idea I had at a time when very little else was up to me. Now, when I sit in the chair, it reminds me of the tough situations life throws at you, and that you often just have to keep calm and trust the process.

Ta det lite lugn - take it a bit easy.