My son was born in 2013.  As he got older, he needed furniture, and while I may not be up to fine furniture, I can certainly do kids furniture!  I modeled the chair in Sketchup, basing it off of the chairs he already had in his classroom.  Basic plywood chairs that are mass manufactured for kids.  I used MDF because… well, because I have a LOT of it.  I didn’t want him exposed to anything in the MDF, so I put a coat of lacquer between the MDF and the paint.  It actually makes a very nice sandable finish.  The lacquer hardens the fibers and you basically are left with a composite.

After the chair, he needed a table.  Again, I designed this in Sketchup, but really only kept to the design roughly.  I had tapered legs, but I ended up not building a tapering jig.  Because I got such a nice sandable, finish from the lacquered MDF, I didn’t need the edging on the tabletop either.  So instead, I rounded everything.  This turned out to be a great idea for a toddler.  The joiner was all pocket-holes.  This was built on a short time table.  I did fill in the pocket holes or just through-hole screws with wood filler to fill the holes and sanded it so you can’t see them.

For finish, again, I sealed all the MDF with lacquer so I just used a decent latex interior paint on top of that.  I fortunately had some in the primary colors (though not as bright as I might have liked).

In the end, my son loved them both!  He plays at that table, he eats at that table, he practically lives at that table.  He’s actually starting to outgrow it and I’m planning a bigger set now.  This one will get passed down to his sister.