Category: Customer Photos

We know how rewarding making your own custom furniture can be. Knowing you designed and completed a piece of furniture for yourself (or a loved one) is always satisfying. One of the most used pieces of furniture in today’s multi-functional houses is a custom made bench. As part of a dining room set, a bench provides ample sitting room; in an entryway it is a place to take footwear on and off or to place heavy items upon entering the house. In an office setting benches provide a waiting area for clients or simply an attractive and welcoming furnishing.

Knowing you built this piece yourself provides the ultimate satisfaction. Creating your own piece is as easy as determining what top to use and then picking out what style of legs you want. Do your metal bench legs need to be custom? Not necessarily. We offer standard sized bench legs but we can customize bench legs for a perfect fit. Once you’ve determined the bench top to use (and its thickness) you can determine the bench height. Measure how tall you want the bench and subtract the width of the top. Now you have the height of the legs you want. Is it a height other than our standard offering? If yes, it is a custom leg height. Let us know what you want and we’ll make it – all of our table and bench legs are handmade right here in the United States!

As always, send us a picture when you’re done…we love seeing our customer’s creations!

Wow! Just when we think we’ve seen it all, an email like this one comes through. Designer / carpenter / DIY furniture maker Kim sent us a link to her post about an amazing bench she designed and created using our rebar hairpin legs as bench legs. She started with a beautiful thick slab of walnut and brought an amazing idea to the design…making the bench comfortable and custom-fit for each sitter. Not only do the pencils add a unique look and an eye-catching visual quality, but each one is spring-loaded to give the sitter a form-fitting experience!

Amazing work Kim! We hope to help you create more pieces in the future…you’ve broken the mold! To see all the details on Kim’s process and check out other projects, check out the full post about Kim’s unique pencil bench on her blog.

Every time it seems like we’ve seen hairpin coffee table legs added to every type of table top, one of our clients wows us with a totally new design, or a totally new type of wood. Ray on the west coast sent us this picture of his new coffee table with hairpin legs, and we’re glad he let us know what the wood is, because it’s like nothing we’ve seen before. He told us this is a section of a 50 year old carob tree, which they needed to remove from the property. For those not familiar with the tree, carob is a middle eastern evergreen tree, which can be grown in similar climate, and is most often grown for its fruit. It produces long bean pods, and the beans can be ground up and turned into a confection similar to chocolate.

Anyway, Ray loves the hairpin coffee table legs we sent him, and we’re glad he sent us a photo back, because this circular live edge table  is absolutely gorgeous and certainly one of a kind. It just goes to show that even when you’re just doing some tree work or landscaping, maybe something beautiful like this table can come out of it!

Many of the questions we receive through the site are questions about what dimensions they should request when they order some custom metal bench legs. Often times, the inspiration for building a custom piece of furniture comes from seeing a piece at a friend’s house or a business like a cafe or outdoor restaurant. If you think of it…go ahead and take the measurements of the bench that is inspiring you to build one. If anyone is curious what you’re up to, you can let them know you’re looking for the perfect fit for your home…and you really love their bench. Everyone likes a compliment.

If you don’t have a bench to measure, have a look at the specifications of your favorite chair or couch. The height of most chairs and couches is between 15 and 18 inches. Our flat bar metal bench legs don’t add much in the way of height, only 1/2 an inch…so if you want a bench with a seat that is 18 inches tall, measure the wood you have, add a half inch for the metal bench supports and then you’ll know what height you need the legs to be. We recommend ordering legs that will remain an inch or two inside the edge of the bench, so measure the length of your bench surface front to back, subtract two (or four) inches, and that will be your length. Our flat bar metal comes in a standard 2 1/2 inch width…but you won’t have to worry about stability, these bench legs are very stable.

So, now you have your length, width and height formulas, so choose a piece of wood like our customer from the featured image above did, order some custom metal bench legs and create a totally unique DIY bench for your home or business!

One furniture style that is a versatile modern furniture comeback, and is unique in every instance is the butcher block. Butcher block tables used to be made from a solid piece of wood, and they were used in commercial and residential kitchens for food preparation. More recently, in the interest of keeping costs down, butcher blocks are often made from strips of wood pressed together to create the block, instead of using large center-cut pieces of wood. Far from being unattractive, woodworkers use this process to create amazing patterns and incredibly beautiful pieces of furniture…most of which will never be used in the kitchen. We like the simple look of a butcher block finished with hairpin legs, but they can just as easily be built with flat bar legs, or tube steel bench supports.

One of the ways woodworkers and DIY furniture makers have used the butcher block to great success is the butcher block coffee table, or the butcher block end table. There are classic styles, striped butcher block tables, and even these butcher block style tables from Wood Shed Production, which are a revival of classic butcher block styles (albeit with updated table legs). Some of these tables are made from single sections of wood, like turn of the century butcher block tables, and some of them are made from composite wood styles, like we expect to see in modern butcher block tables. Thanks to the good folks at Wood Shed Production for allowing us to show off their amazing workmanship alongside our hairpin legs, and hopefully this will inspire your next furniture project…whether it’s a butcher block or not!

How can you create a unique coffee table that perfectly suits your living room? How about starting with one of our creative hairpin leg styles and building your coffee table from the ground up? We received an email from Sean showing off his amazing round coffee table made with our ‘Just the Tip’ hairpin legs, which we like to describe as ‘hairpin legs with feet’.

Sean’s new table reminds us of a shield, or a crest and we can honestly say he’s created a piece of furniture unlike anything our customers have sent in before. We’re happy our creative table legs helped Sean get his project completed, and here is what Sean had to say about it:

My friends love our new table and I’m passing out your website to everyone that asks.

Thanks again!

Sean

We may be in the modern bench leg business, but we know a beautiful piece of wood when we see one, and boy did Michael from Wood Shed Production choose some amazing wood to make benches from. He sent us some photos of these new benches made with flat bar bench legs.

First, they take reclaimed and vintage wood from all over the US and design custom furniture based on their customers’ specifications. Some of the lumber comes from homes or barns, like these two sections of beam, and sometimes the wood is harvested as a byproduct of the timber trade. Wood that is cut by the timber trade is often oddly shaped, or not considered a commercial wood types, and would be are discarded. The folks at Wood Shed Production know there is still plenty of potential in this lumber, so they take the time to cut, craft and finish pieces like these benches, and we’re proud that they chose us to make the bench legs! If you are interested in unique handcrafted furniture, have a look around our blog and get inspired. You can create wonderful furniture with a set of bench legs and some amazing lumber.

We’re big supporters of the DIY furniture movement, and we believe that anyone with some basic tools and an idea can build a beautiful piece of furniture for the home or as a gift. However, there might be something even more inspiring than building a new piece of DIY furniture. How about resurrecting an old piece of furniture? We sold a set of hairpin legs to Mary, and when she finished up her home furniture restoration project, she sent us a photo. Here is Mary’s “new” coffee table, and the quote she sent along with it.

“We were given a handmade redwood table with very thick wood stump legs. After sanding down the black varnish on the top and replacing the stumps with hairpin legs, we now love our one of a kind table. Thank you for having the legs to make this transformation possible.”

Mary

After all, anyone can order a coffee table online or pick one out at a furniture warehouse, but now Mary and her family can enjoy their new coffee table and let everyone who compliments it know they made that table! We’re glad our hairpin legs could help complete her DIY furniture project, and thanks to Mary for sending us a photo of the finished product.