Build an Adirondack Chair: the Ultimate Outdoor Furniture

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Diagram: Chair cutting list.
Diagram: Chair cutting list.
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Spend blissful days in an easy-to-build Adirondack chair.
Spend blissful days in an easy-to-build Adirondack chair.
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Sideframes for the Adirondack chair.
Sideframes for the Adirondack chair.
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Framework for the Adirondack chair.
Framework for the Adirondack chair.
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Templates for the Adirondack chair.
Templates for the Adirondack chair.
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Add a backrest to the Adirondack chair.
Add a backrest to the Adirondack chair.
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Templates for the footrest legs.
Templates for the footrest legs.
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You can choose from several options for the Adirondack chair backrest.
You can choose from several options for the Adirondack chair backrest.
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For a more finished look, add wood plugs to cover the screw holes.
For a more finished look, add wood plugs to cover the screw holes.
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Assemble the footrest frame.
Assemble the footrest frame.
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Diagram: Footrest cutting list.
Diagram: Footrest cutting list.
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The finished footrest.
The finished footrest.
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You can choose from several options for the Adirondack chair backrest.
You can choose from several options for the Adirondack chair backrest.
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The table includes a lower shelf for books, snacks or anything you might need for an afternoon relaxing in an Adirondack chair.
The table includes a lower shelf for books, snacks or anything you might need for an afternoon relaxing in an Adirondack chair.
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Carriage bolts make secure joints.
Carriage bolts make secure joints.
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Diagram: Table cutting list.
Diagram: Table cutting list.

Spend blissful days in an easy-to-build chair when you build an adirondack chair from these easy-to-follow instructions. (See the chair diagrams in the image gallery.)

Even if you haven’t spent some of the most blissfully restful hours of your life in an Adirondack-style lawn chair, you’ve certainly seen them in ads, movies, or magazine articles about the elegant Lake Champlain estates where they evolved in the Gay ’90s, (1890s, that is). Adirondacks are those great wide, wood-plank chairs with old-time charm and spreading arms that beckon you in . . . but with a seat that is so wickedly comfortable and deep that you just may “. . . need a #@$*& spring in your seat to get out . . . ,” as my woodworking grandfather used to grouse when hauling free of a lawn chair (that he’d made two generations earlier) . . . himself being well into his 80s then.

Their great, broad arms are perfectly horizontal so they can hold a cold drink, a small library of summer reading, and a big lunch all at once . . . but this makes their arms so deviously high above the depths of the seat that your elbows are forced up . . . so you don’t have the leverage to do anything more strenuous than a crossword puzzle. Add in the warmth of the summer sun, lap of waves or crash of surf, maybe another of those cold drinks . . . and an Adirondack chair can do marvelously destructive things to your ambition.

You can purchase pale copies of the true Adirondack chair, power-stapled together from cheap 1 inch (actually ¾ inches-thick) pine shelving in mall stores and unfinished furniture outlets for $35, or $150+ chairs constructed from domestic hardwoods, or $200+ chairs of redwood or plantation teak from mail-order catalogs.

For the most part though, commercial designs are “downsized” from the expansive original to be lightweight enough to ship by UPS. They lack the strength to stand up to decades of serious use or to the weather-beating that any outdoor furniture must endure.

  • Published on Jun 1, 1997
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