New dresser for our master bedroom

Front View of Dresser

 

Rear View

I was having a hard time coming up with a new design for a dresser for our master bedroom.  I wanted it to match well with the arts and crafts bed and matching nightstands that I made a couple of years ago but I didn't want to do a straight copy of a plan.  Finally inspiration struck while visiting the Thos. Moser showroom in Freeport, Maine.  I stumbled across their American Bungalow tall dresser and immediately fell in love with it.  That one has a very traditional shaker style rectangular cherry cabinet suspended inside a very arts and crafts looking structure. Very Niiiice (in Borat speak). As much as I admire Mr. Moser's designs I have no intention of copying it outright and unfortunately I cannot afford any of his furniture. So as with most furniture, I borrowed a little inspiration from Mr. Moser as well as from an exhaustive search on google images and came up with the basic parameters for my own design.

I was looking for a large dresser that would stand on the wall opposite the foot of our bed than I can put our TV on top of.  I also wanted lots of drawers and for it to be a double dresser so my wife and I would each have a side.  (in theory at least, in practice she might let me have a drawer or two!) and of course it had to draw from some of the stylistic elements of our bed and nightstands.

In the photos above, you can see where I'm at with the design.  There will be two identical flatsawn red oak cases dovetailed together at the corners.  The drawer web frames will be dovetailed in at the sides and back with the drawer runners mortised and tenoned into the front and back "blades" Only the front will be glued and the back will be loose to allow for expansion of the case sides.  I'll likely make the runners and rear blade out of ash since it's relatively inexpensive in these parts.  The two cases will bear on front and back stretchers that will be tenoned into an outer frame that has the same vertical spindles as our bed.  I've extended the rear posts up through the top and added a crest rail across the top.  The holes through the crest rail are decorative but they also allow you to pass plugs through for the electronics that will inevitably be placed on top of this dressser.

The back of the cases will likely be tongue and groove pine boards. The drawers will have half blind dovetails in the front and through dovetails in the back and have a solid ash bottom.  I may consider putting in a center runner in the larger bottom drawers to cut down the span of the drawer bottoms.  

I love using skecthup for this stuff but I'm still a bit worried about the proportions.  In particular I'm wondering if the 2" square legs are big enough.  I should really do a full scale mock up of this thing but I'm not sure what material to use for the mock up.  Perhaps rigid insulation? Another issue with the legs is that I know I can buy riftsawn 8/4 stock from my local supplier which will likely only yield a 1 3/4" square leg.  To get the 2" square I'll likely glue up the leg pieces face to face and be diligent in ensuring that the exposed edges are riftsawn so the seams don't show as much.  I could try the Gustav Stickley Quadrilinear post method but those lock miter bits scare me in the sense that I've heard they are tough to set up properly to get good results.

Sofa table finally completed! Woohoo!

The last post I wrote regarding my sofa table project was about my original sketchup model and was, sadly,posted on Sept. 28, 2009. That's about a year and a half of working on this project from conception to completion. To be honest I almost had it beat about 4 months ago when I placed it in my living room to finally see what it would look like in the space. That was a big mistake! At the time all I had left to do was to turn the door and drawer pulls and brush some varnish over the two coats of danish I had put onto the tabletop. Well sure enough, one of the kids spilled something on the top and ruined the finish completely. I mean within a week of having it in my living room there were 2 or 3 major water spots. Lessons learned: 1. Don't put the furniture in place until it's well and truly done and 2. I finally learned how to finish a tabletop with a really nice durable finish. More on that later..

A quick description of the piece is in order: The primary wood is cherry with the drawer fronts made out of one piece of curly birch for grain continuity. The drawer sides and bottoms are eastern white pine and some of the secondary wood in the case (drawer runnners etc.) are made out of yellow birch. There are several different finishes on this piece depending on the level of durability required etc. The tabletop is easily the most laborious finish I've ever done. One coat of sealcoat using a 1lb cut to control blotching in the cherry. Two coats of Danish Oil to enhance the chatoyance of the wood. Three coats of brushed on varnish followed by two coats of gel varnish and finally a coat of paste wax for a total of 9 coats of finish with all of the sanding and rubbing out between successive coats. The remainder of the exterior of the case is simply a coat of sealcoat followed with 3 coats of wet sanded danish oil using 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper. The inside of the drawers etc were finished with a 2lb cut of sealcoat. I had a tough time deciding on how to finish the curly birch thinking that a water based poly might be the way to go to get better contrast between the two different species but the water based didn't bring out the figure of the wood so I ended up deciding on the smae Danish Oil finsih as the rest of the case.

I am very proud of this case piece and found it to be a great skill builder. In particular I'm very happy with the joinery for the drawer blades and dividers into the case sides since these are all dovetailed. This is a detail I picked up watching Tommy MacDonald's Bombe series and I did it using a paring block the samy way Tommy did it and it worked out great.

I deliberated quite a bit on how to build the back of the case. From what I've seen, it appears that many period furniture pieces were done using shiplapped pine boards which is fine if the back is hidden from view against a wall. In this case however, since the center "cubby" is open I wanted to keep the back in cherry. So I ended making a frame and panel back with bookmatched cherry panels.

As you can see in the opening photo, all of the drawer fronts were dovetailed by hand using an uneven tail size and spacing. The drawer backs are done using through dovetails and the drawer bottoms are 1/2" thick solid pine tapered to 1/4" thick around three sides to fit into the grooves in the drawer front and sides.

This was my first attempt at installing knife hinges as well. I purchased some nice Brusso hinges from Lee Valley and followed the process that Timothy Rousseau shows in his small cabinet project in the Fine Woodworking Project Video series. Mr. Rousseau's instructions were invaluable to this process. As for the drawer pulls I looked at an awful lot of pulls on the Lee Valley website but it was when I visited the Thomas Moser showroom in Freeport Maine when I decided to try my hand at turning my own pulls. One of Mr. Moser's display cabinets had the most beautiful tear drop shaped pulls. I tried to commit the shape to memory but ended up making something similar on the lathe in cocobolo.

Hailey's Christmas bookcase

We'll I'm frantically trying to finish a bookcase for my God-daughter, Hailey's Christmas present. her brother, Reid, has a nice big built-in bookshelf in his room and I think Hailey's a bit jealous. These kids are wonderful readers and just love books so they have quite a collection and not a whole lot of place to put them. That's the inspiration for this piece. I did some online searching on google images for a bookcase suitable for a little girl's room and came across a photo I liked. The case had to be both challenging to increase my skill level and be simple enough that I'd be able to finish it by Christmas. I started it with lots of time to spare and had most of the case put together over a weekend. but, of course, life steps in. My wife wanted me to finish a basement bedroom and that took precendence for a few weeks and worked got hectic. Same old story. So here I am, 8 days from Christmas eve and I've yet to start putting any paint on the thing. I turned the feet last night and tonight I plan on attaching the feet to the case bottom plinth, attach the plinth and the top to the case and then start the drawers. of course, the drawer fronts are curved and I'd like to dovetail the drawers at least at the front, which will add some complication but I think that by the end of this weekend I'll be able to put my first coat of primer on the case and then spend the evenings next week applying 2-3 coats of white paint. Wish me luck and Merry Christmas

Cherry Sofa Table

Well anyone who has been following my blog (including me, that's likely a whole 1 person) has seen that I had previously posted a screen capture of a walnut sofa table. For some reason, that version of the table just wasn't doing it for me. I had cross-grain issues, build issues, etc. I just plain couldn't get inspired by it. Then one day, while at work, I catch out of the corner of my eye one of the many furniture pictures I have for inspiration scrolling by on my screen saver. I don't even remember downloading, or having ever seen that photo before, but I fell in love with it immediately. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with the model in the image.

The table is made of solid american black cherry with the only exception being the the bird's eye maple drawer fronts. It is essentially all frame and panel construction and is comprised of about 110 individual parts with over 50 mortise and tenon joints. From a design point of view, I think one of the reasons I didn't like the old model was that I tried to include too many strong visual elements. Too much exposed joinery etc. One this table there are only three featured design elements: the first is the contrasting wood drawer fronts. the second is the through dovetails on the drawers and the third more subtle is just the cherry wood grain. If I had to categorize this piece in a certain style I guess it would have to be shaker with some craftsman influence.

In the original photo of the piece, there was also a Harvey Ellis style craftsman inlay in each of the two doors. Though I'm keen on learning how to create these inlays, I think it would be too much for this piece. I'd much rather incorporate the contrasting wood tones.

To date I've purchased about 50 bd ft of cherry and have milled the parts for the two side frames and I've just started laying out the joinery in the legs. Stay tuned for some photos of the work in progress.

Craftsman Curtain Rods

My very talented wife has taken up sewing and I have to say that she has a real knack for it. She's in the process of making these curtains for our living room windows and I couldn't resist taking a picture to post. She still has a couple of things to complete such as trimming the thread ends and making the tie backs but I think they look pretty awesome. This blog however, is not about sewing, it's about woodworking. So not to be outdone, I decided to make the curtain rods for the windows and of course turned to the interwebs for inspiration. We did a search for craftsman style curtain rods and we found something very similar to what's show here.

I started by making the rod out of some scrap red oak I had. The only embellishment is that I cut small "pyramid" shapes at the ends of the rod. For the supports I found a 1" thick red oak board ans sketched the design right on it. I bored the mortises for the rod out with a forstner bit and cleaned out the hole with a mortising chisel and file. I then inlaid the walnut accent squares and then rounded over all the exposed edges with a coarse file and sandpaper. once this was done I turned my attention to how I was going to hang the thing. Now being a structural engineer you'd think that I'd had this figured out before I got to this point. But, I'm purposely trying not to over-engineer things and let the design come first. What I decided to do was take a trip to the hardware store for ideas. I found some small steel plates with "keyholes" in them that I could recess into the back of the supports using a router. I finished everything with a coat of Varathane mission oak stain topcoated with shellac. It turned out to be a fun little project that I was able to complete in a weekend for under $10. God I love woodworking!

Sofa Table Design 2

So I've done some more work on my sofa table design and I'm feeling alot better about the whole thing since I've added some personal touches. As you can see in the photo, I've incorporated breadboard ends and a crest rail on the top, added wedged through tenons on the side stretchers and changed the door joinery from a through mortise and tenon to pinned miters.

For some reason that big top just didn't feel right without a crest rail on it and after a few different designs I settled on the one in the picture with a very low profile that enhances the horizontality of the piece. I'm considering putting a series of square holes in similar to those I incorporated into the crest rail on my nightstands (previous blog post) I'll put some more thought into that but I'm scared to overdo it with the craftsman details. The breadboard ends I added to help keep the top flat, because I really like the look of them and frankly because I've always wanted to try and build them.

I extended the tenons on the side stretchers and turned them into wedged through tenons. I still plan on using ebony wedges (If I can find some) The tenons are 1/2" thick and I may still play with their proportions to get the top and bottom of the top tenon to line up with the depth of the drawer.

The pinned mitres on the doors I saw in Fine Woodworking issue #200 in an article by Russell Jensen. This is a traditional japanese joinery technique called "kane tsugi" that I find very beautiful. I'm pretty pumped to try and make this joint.

Of course, I had to pass all of the design ideas by my better half to see if she'd veto any of these decisions. She was a bit unsure about the pinned mitres because she felt that it was a bit too much but after a few seconds changed her mind. phheuw! What are your thoughts on them. Below is a picture of the piece with the regular through mortise and tenon joints on the doors for comparison.

Sofa Table Project

Here's the sketchup model for my next project. It's a sofa table for my living room. I took inspiration from a picture I found online and scaled. I've been busily modelling the inside of the case to try and eliminate any cross grain joinery in solid wood. At this point it's my intent to make this out of walnut for a primary wood and white birch as a secondary wood. There are a couple of black accent strips which at this point are intended to be ebony but due to cost may well end up being ebonized walnut. Once I have the inside of the carcase and back figured out I intend to make a few modifications just to dress it up and make it my own. A few craftsman details such as through tenons, set back drawers etc come to mind, but I don't want to overdo it. if anyone has any suggestions I'd gladly entertain them.