DIY Plywood Lounge Sofa

This is a lounge sofa we made using only plywood. It’s a simple project that we completed over a weekend and it fits our hermit lifestyle. The deep cushions let us lounge comfortably and easily transition to sleep mode when we binge too much Netflix

The inspiration for building this came from our distaste of our old couch. Basically the old couch bottom was too shallow and didn’t allow us to properly lounge unless we were on the chase portion and this didn’t align with our hermit style at all.

Keeping the main priority in mind, we designed this sofa around a twin size mattress. With the dimensions we used, you can use either a regular twin or a twin XL. The only change will be the overhang on the sides having less room for placing stuff when using a twin XL.

Here are the materials we used for this project

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(5) sheets of plywood: 8’ x 4’ x 0.75”

Wood Glue - https://amzn.to/3dvAkq3

2.5” Wood screws - https://amzn.to/2WPgmk3

Spring Clamps - https://amzn.to/2vRo02p

Polyurethane finish - https://amzn.to/2UmClgL

We first made the main bottom base by laminating two sheets together using a ton of wood glue, making sure to spread it throughout all the edges. Using spring clamps to keep them in place, we set it aside to dry and moved onto the legs. When laminating anything it’s a good idea to use as many clamps as you can. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough to thoroughly clamp all the edges, so we noticed some areas of separation.

Using one of the sheets, we cut a 21” wide piece with a 15 degree bevel along one of the long edges. This is used for the back support. The remaining plywood from this sheet was cut into 20” x 16” pieces for the back rest supports we cut using our Shapeoko CNC. If you don’t have a CNC and want to cut this out with a jigsaw or another method, you can download the drawing clicking HERE!

The legs are made up of 10 - 6” wide pieces. One sheet can make 15 pieces, so we stacked two sheets and cut them at the same time using our circular saw and straight edge.

After all 30 pieces were cut, we lightly sanded the edges and glued them layer by layer. Although not completely necessary, we used our brad nailer to keep the layers together while the glue dried.

While we let the legs dry, we went back to the base and cut off 3” from the length in order to get a 45” total width to better fit the mattress.

Since everything at this point was cut, laminated and dried we went to sanding everything using 220 grit sand paper on our orbital sander.

Then we finished everything with a few coats of water based polyurethane.

Once everything dried, we dry fit the legs onto the base by tracing the outline so we know the boundaries and predrilled several holes for the screws.

We moved all the pieces inside to our living room and assembled everything using 2.5” wood screws.

Although we didn’t document it, we sewed a cover for the mattress using upholstery fabric so that it is more durable and aesthetically fitting for the living room.

Then we threw on some large pillows from IKEA and called the project done!

We love how it came out and how comfortable it is. We can lounge all day with plenty of room for the three of us.