Toddler Step Stool

My niece's birthday is quickly approaching, she is going to be 3. When I spoke with my brother to see what she would like he suggested that I make her a step stool for the kitchen so she can reach the counter and help cook.

The step stool is going to be painted so I'm not planning on being to picky about the wood. I wanted something about 12 inches wide to cut the sides of the stool out of. When shopping at Menards they had a board that was 1x12 inches at 4 feet long for $17. It seemed a bit expensive considering they sell 1x6 at 4 feet long for $3. Since I have a planer and need some practice I just picked up a few of the 6 inch boards and glued 2 of them together.

Here you can see the (almost) 12 inch board after being glued up and planed down, there's also a picture of our shop helper Chewie.

I cut all of the pieces out of the 1x12 @ 4ft board and 2 1x6 @ 4ft boards.  Two of the smaller boards are for the steps and the other two are for kick plates to make sure my niece doesn't lose her footing. 

The kick plates were ripped down a bit and the excess pieces are going to be used to keep the stool sturdy in the back. You will understand a bit better as we go along if you can't visualize it yet.

To make sure the left and right side were the same size, I used double sided sticky tape and put them together. Then I took them to my spindle sander (drill press attachment) and sanded them down to the same size. They were already pretty close but after cutting them out on my band saw they were just a little bit off in some places.

Before assembly I rounded over the front and back edges of the top step and the front of the bottom step as well as both sides of the handles. I countersunk all of the screw heads far enough to plug with a dowel and predrilled all of the holes to make sure there was no cracking when tightening up the screws. You can see here on the top step that there is a lip on both sides, this is to again make sure that my niece doesn't lose her footing and have a spill.

Here I have plugged all of the holes with a dowel, I cut the dowel pieces down to a manageable size with my band saw. It took some elbow grease and a rubber mallet to tap in the dowels with a bit of glue.

I used my random orbit sander with 80 grit paper to grind down the dowels. After that I switched up to 120 grit. At this point we are ready for paint.

I used a green paint that matches my brothers kitchen cabinets and a pink paint that he had lying around. They go together better than I thought they were going to. 

And here is the final product. I used a stencil for the flower and printed one for her name.