I’m not so sure I like the term “loveseat” but that seems to be the proper name for a small couch/sofa built for two people so that’s what I’ll go with! If you’re a follower of my work you may recall my interpration of the famous Z-chair which I completed a year of so ago. Well, now it’s on to another project for the front bedroom of our home. The room currently has a queen size bed but is rarely used by overnight guests. We’ve decided to make that room a more useable space for us and use a blowup bed on those occasions where it may be needed. Making this smaller loveseat will leave plenty of room for that and allow us to use that room as part of the house. One problem with this room is the way the door opens and the configuration of the walls makes it impossible to get large furniture in the room. That means I get to challenge myself to use knockdown joints with threaded inserts, cross dowel nuts, and through bolts — hey, I love a challenge!

The only real furnishing in this room is the Birch cabinet I made previously. I decided to make this loveseat from Birch as well and who knows, maybe a table is in the future too. As the picture shows, I prefer to draw my plans out full size once the design has been worked out; and then cut pieces of Masonite to give me a true representation of the piece. There will be 6 pieces; the seat, right and left sides, front and rear stretchers, and the back. I plan to use brass inserts and black 1/4×20 hardware to assemble it.

After creating my cut list I purchased about 31 board feet of 8/4 Birch from Peterman Lumber here in Las Vegas. Since you have to buy whatever boards they have it’s challenging to get the right amount. The boards I bought were all 7″ or so in width and 8′ long. After cutting pieces to rough size I planed a working edge on them so they could be ripped and resawn as needed. The side frames are 1 1/8″ thick while the seat assembly and back are 1″ in thickness.

The stretcher between the legs has a single tenon at the front and a double at the rear. The stretcher was kept square so it lines up on the sliding arm and then tapered after the tenons were cut. The mortises are 3/8″ x 1 1/4″ deep and 90° to the leg. The tenons are angled at 15° and were cut using a flat top rip blade and my Sawstop sliding table. It was easy to set the opposite angle by adjusting the arm to the end of the board while keeping the fence set at the same location — much easier than using a wedge.

At this point, my main goal is to get the leg assemblies put together so they can be used to locate where the threaded brass inserts need to be installed the relationship of all of the pieces. The front and rear stretchers attach to the leg sections with connector bolts and cross dowel nuts — this was a challenge to drill a straight 1/4″ hole about three inches long! To add to the challenge the tops are angled to allow the seat to sit lower in the rear than in the front. The seat and back sections use threaded brass inserts and connector bolts and that too was a process. Started with 1/16″ pilot holes on the drill press to insure they are straight and then the loveseat was reassembled to line everything up. More complicated than I can write up so these pictures will help — if you want more details feel free to contact me.

To summarize the slide show basically the first hole drilled is 1/16″ and done on the drill press to get it as straight as possible. Then the parts were clamped in position so that I could use a hand drill through that hole to mark the location on the adjoining piece. Threaded insert holes were 3/8″ and connector holes were 1/4″ it all worked! In this picture you’re looking at the inside of the loveseat. Number 1 are the tenons for the eventual armrests; Number 2 is the seat frame, and Number 3 is the backrest. The piece of masonite represents the foam for the seat.

This is what the piece looks like at this point. No rush on this project, just taking my time and trying to avoid making mistakes which is easy to do — I’ll do separate blogs as work progresses.