My partner and I want to make a plant stand, one of those things kind of like a stepladder with two or three shelves for plants. We have decided the measurements. We’ve bought a pine board (18mm thick) that has a brushed finish. The shop cut it into 41cm lengths, but now we need to take the final centimetre off and cut down about 5-10cm off the other side to bring it down to our desired size of 40cm x 40cm.

How do we do that? How do you cut down to a straight line? The tools (that I think are most relevant anyway, we have a pretty decent home maintenance toolkit of spanners and screwdrivers etc.) we have are:

-large rip saw,

-basic router,

-2 or 3 chisels,

-small hack saw.

Should I cut as close as as possible with the rip saw and then use a straight bit in the router? I am not sure that the guide on the router will be long enough to reach across ~40cm of board to brace against the far edge. If I’m barking up the wrong tree and need to get some other tool, please do let me know. We’re on a tight budget but if it’s a tool that we will use repeatedly, we can probably afford a budget version of it.

Thank you in advance :)