In this article we will show you how to make simple wooden furniture pulls. You can also see the video here:

Don’t forget to also subscribe to our channel!

We made for our children’s bedroom a small cabinet with two white painted MDF doors. For these doors we needed some simple wooden handles. We chose to build them out of ash wood and to stain them with walnut stain. We protected them with primer and water based varnish.

Follow these simple steps and you will have beautiful pulls for your furniture:

1. Set the planer machine at 24 mm.

2. Plane some wooden strips so that you get them to 24 mm by 24 mm. They will be used for both parts of these simple handles. You can use any kind of wood you want. For us, ash wood was the best choice, due to its hardness and to the beauty of the ash wood fiber.

3. Cut the ends of the wooden strips in order to remove the snipe (if it appeared after planing)

4. Mark the length of the long pieces. We marked them at 25 cm. This length will be the length of our wooden furniture pulls.

5. Cut the long pieces of wood at 25 cm, as marked.

6. Mark the small pieces of wooden strips. We needed four 3.5 cm long pieces of ash, two for each wooden handle.

7. Glue together the three pieces for each handle. We used polyurethane adhesive in order to be sure our wooden furniture handles will never break.

8. Tighten the pieces together with clamps. If the clamps are not that good, use some buffers in order not to damage the handles.

9. Remove the excess of polyurethane adhesive using a sharp chisel. Be sure to remove all of it. Otherwise, when staining, ugly stain spots will appear.

10. Sand flush the ends of the wooden furniture pulls. We used the belt and the disc sander. It’ s quite simple to sand the surface by using 80 grit sandpaper. You only have to remove the small differences left from the glue up of the two parts of the handle.

11. Sand the faces of the wooden furniture pulls. We used here the same method as described above.

12. Sand the furniture pulls faces and round the sharp edges. For the long sharp edges we used a finishing sander. With a little practice you can round them almost perfectly.

13. Round the sharp edges at the ends. Here, we turned back to the disc sander only because the edges of the ends are too short to be sanded in other way.

14. Finish them by sanding by hand: the back, the faces and all the rounded edges. We used 120 grit and 320 grit sandpaper, so that our ash wood furniture handles finally had a fine surface.

This is the aspect of our wooden furniture handle, after all these steps.

15. Drill the holes for installing these simple furniture pulls. You also can use these holes for staining and varnishing the wooden handles. To avoid breaking of the pulls, drill through both pieces of wood and use longer screws when installing.

16. Stain the handles with what color of stain you want. We used walnut stain. Be sure you wipe the excess stain. Otherwise, some dark spots might appear.

17. Apply a layer of water based primer, after the stain has dried. Do not sand the surface before applying the primer because there is a risk to also remove the stain here and there.

18. Sand the wooden furniture pulls with 320 grit sandpaper. The surface should be very smooth. Remove any dust with a rag. Now, the wooden handles are prepared to the final touch.

19. Apply a layer of water based varnish and let it to dry.

20. Install the simple ash wood furniture pulls. For that, mark the position of the holes on the door, drill the holes and fit the pulls in place using screws. Use long enough screws to make sure they reach the second layer of the pull.