Upcycled kids' chair from old fence posts

This upcycled kids' chair is almost entirely made from leftovers. The seat is the top of a bar stool: one of our stools broke, and the only replacement I could find was a different colour, so I bought another stool for its base and was left with a spare top. The legs are old fence posts that spent more than twenty years holding up garden panels before they were replaced.

Reclaiming the fence posts

The posts were rotten at the ends, so the first job was running a metal detector over them to find hidden nails, pulling the big ones out with grips, and cutting back until I hit sound wood. On the table saw I made a rough rip cut to bring each post down in width, checked the blade was still at 90 degrees, then used my edge-jointing jig to shave a millimetre off one side and get a perfectly straight edge. Flipping that edge down and repeating the process gave me two clean faces at right angles on all four legs.

Cutting tapered, splayed legs

I wanted the legs tapered at around 8 degrees, so I marked a line on the jointing jig and ran each leg through on both sides. To make life harder for myself, I also wanted the legs to splay out to the front and to the side. That meant cutting a compound angle (about 30 degrees) at the top and bottom of each leg on the chop saw, keeping them all the same length.

Fitting the base and finishing

For the base, I traced the stool top onto paper to make a template, transferred it to some plywood left over from my last project, the under-stairs storage drawers, and cut it out with a jigsaw. Each leg was held in position with double-sided tape while I checked the angle, then drilled, countersunk and fixed with the biggest screw I could find.

After sanding and a light chamfer on the foot of each leg to stop them chipping, everything got a couple of coats of the dark stain and varnish left over from the previous build. Felt pads are superglued to the feet, and the base bolts onto the seat using the stool top's original threaded inserts.

I deliberately left the big nail holes in the fence-post legs rather than filling them. They're a nice reminder of what the wood used to be, and they give the chair a bit of character.