I’ve been looking at digital pianos for a while now. Since I wanted something I can learn piano on, a couple of things were important. First, it had to be full-sized (88 keys). Second, it had to have “real” piano action (with full-sized keys). Third, it had to fit into my budget. I ended up with the Casio CPD-100 digital piano. It had good reviews (excellent for learning) and felt a lot more real to me — even comparing it to digital pianos twice its price (I had my eye on a couple of Yamahas). It’s not a synth, so no whiz-bang functions, but it should be a good instrument to learn on.

The piano is pretty big — about 52″ wide and 25 pounds, so I needed a sturdy stand. I didn’t feel like spending $50 on “X” metal stage stands, and the wooden stand from Casio was $120, so I decided to make my own. I went with a shaker bench design, increasing the leg height to 24″. This give me a keyboard height (to top of keys) of 28″.

In the above photo, the top is 52″ long by 12″ wide. Legs are 24″ tall, 12″ wide. The stretcher is 44″ wide and is a 1×4. The lumber was cut to length on my big Makita miter saw, then cutouts done with my Bosch saber saw.

I actually built the stool first, because I wanted to work through the plans and figure out any tricky parts:

The stool top is about 20″ wide. Legs are 18″ tall. I didn’t cut the parts as carefully as I should have (especially the stretcher part), so the stool was not as strong as I wanted it to be. To compensate I added that lower reinforcement. It’s not the best, but it will do.

Here are the two of them together. All sanded up and waiting for a glossy black paint job.

To save money, this project used glued up pine 1x12s. I got them at Lowes for about $15 a board. So, the total cost of lumber was about $30. The downside of using these pre-glued boards is that they aren’t stain friendly — they’d look a bit weird. However, an opaque paint job avoids that issue. (You can get stain-ready boards, but they are more costly.)

If you’d like to make your own, check out the plans at Popular Woodworking. The “Mud Room Bench” is part of their “I Can Do That” series of plans — woodworking projects that don’t require a ton of skill or a lot of expensive equipment. Highly recommended.

Check out the plans (including PDF) here: Mud Room Bench at Popular Woodworking