making a kitchen bench - advice please!

[damson]

Looking for advice and tips!

I want to make a bench that will fit into a corner of our kitchen.

I have some tongued and grooved oak flooring to use as the seat and back rest and I want to use 25mm ply to cut out the bench ends/side pieces. I'll use similar pieces to support the underneath of the bench where the two seats meet in the corner of the room. I intend to build shallow storage under the seats. The tongue and grooved oak will run vertically rather than horizontally.

Hope the above is clear ...

Will the 25mm ply be strong enough to use as side pieces? (I want to jigsaw out a curvy shape for the side pieces - rather like the sides of a metal garden bench).

Any advice on how best to join/fix these two different types of wood together would be great. Should i use oak for any constructional work or can I use pine?

thanks for any advice and thoughts/comments

 

[Bilioustrumpstaine]

Would this site help, they have some plans for a bench.

http://www.freeww.com/kitchen.html

 

[damson]

thanks bilioustrumpstaine - I didn't know that site.

I've got my own design - it's just I'm not confident about the relative merits of using / glueing or dowelling together different types of wood. I'm also not sure that there's enough intrinsic strength in the plywood to support the kind of shape I want to cut out of it .....

; )