Some Recent Woodworking Projects

About a month ago I did a set of cabinets for a client (a former boss) and I thought I would share a few of the photos here. This will give you a bit of an idea of the kind of quality pine furniture that I used to make at one of my old jobs (2002-2008). These are made of regular "common grade" pine, with the nicest boards used for the panels and doors, and the "less pretty" boards used for the shelves. The backs are store bought t-g. The cabinets were built in his shop, and I'll be able to eventually make my kitchen cabinets in pretty much the same way.

Laminating large panels (shelves in the corner unit):



The cabinets were 3 bookcases divided by 2 blanket boxes to span a wall with 2 windows. These are the three bookcase bodies:



Frame pieces for the blanket box fronts and doors:



A semi-complete blanket box:



This is how the units line up, with the large corner one off on the left.



Finished blanket box:





One of the bookcase cabinets with the door in place:



Corner units:



I don't have any good photos of the finished cabinets except for this one. As soon as I had them assembled, we brought them inside. The colour was matched to the original wood floors in the house.

News! Tons of Neat New Stuff

Alright, lots of interesting and exciting things to discuss today! I have over 75 new photos to share!

Upholstery News:

First, I started a new blog for all the upholstery. There's just too many interesting and beautiful pieces that we've been working on, and I don't want to flood my "old house blog" with all the upholstery photos, so that's all being moved to the new blog "Lefebvre's Upholstery". That blog will be updated frequently with some of the better/bigger projects we're working on (we don't bother to post, or even photograph, the more mundane items like vinyl boat seats and chair repairs). I hope all of you who find upholstery to be fascinating, or who just love to see some rather dramatic "before and After" photos will enjoy following that blog. You can find it here:

Lefebvre's Upholstery Blog

I currently have 54 new upholstery photos that will be posted shortly, plus the reposts of the ones I already showed on this blog. If there isn't anything up on the blog yet, just be patient with me, and check back tomorrow.

Foursquare News:

I bought some furniture!

Well, that's a bit of an understatement since I walked away with 14 pieces of furniture, consisting of an entire matched 12 piece dining room set in mahogany, plus two freebies: a leather top (mahogany) coffee table, and an upholstered (beaten-up and falling apart) Eastlake style Victorian chair.

I saw the set advertised locally through Kijiji, and it only had 4 small photos, with a 500$ asking price. I could see one of the chairs poking out from the edge of a photo, and the table with 8 chairs seemed worth the asking price on their own. The set also came with a glass-door china hutch, a large sideboard, and another cabinet.

I contacted the seller (who was conveniently 2 blocks away on 4th street - note: I'm on 5th), and made plans to have a look at the set on Thursday night. I was very excited when I saw it, and that's when the owner also offered me the coffee table and Victorian chair "free if you want them". He also said he could deliver it (SWEET!!!)

I wanted to post about it on Thursday night or Friday, but I didn't want to jinx anything and I waited until today.

I spent all morning and part of Friday cleaning up all the clutter and junk around the house and in the garage to make the place look half decent, and to clear some room. This morning I moved my old chairs to the basement, and dismantled the crappy old table I had.

Dining Room ready for the new arrivals!



The chairs (before taking them inside from the garage):



Ta-Dah!



Hutch:



I started to really look over the set, and I noticed quite a few nice details. One of the signs of a high-end set is that the back legs on the larger pieces (sideboard, hutch, etc) are carved/turned. Many of the more basic sets usually have plain back legs.

Next, the drawers. Wow. Not only are they well made, but this is the first time I've seen internal drawers that are made with 1/4 sawn White Oak. For those who don't know, quarter sawn lumber is when the wood is cut radially through the tree (think pie wedges). This means that the grain running through the board is running perpendicular to the board (stripes as opposed to curved lines when you look at the end of a board). This causes a lot of waste, but the wood is more stable, less likely to warp, and it's also the only way to see those beautiful "tiger stripes" that are present in all pieces of Oak. Regular "flat sawn" wood will have shallow curves in the wood grain, and they're more likely to cup/warp, but it's much cheaper and easier to do. Almost all the solid wood furniture you'll see today is flat sawn.



Then there's the dovetails. Most people know that dovetails are good, and a lot of older stuff will have them (machine cut or hand cut are equally good). These drawers not only have dovetails at the front...



But also at the back! This is something that you will RARELY see. NONE of my other antiques have this with the exception of my little mahogany night stand (which has just one drawer).



When I had first seen the set I thought it was all Walnut (which is very typical for this style of 1920s set) but when I looked at it in the light, I could see that it's mahogany. All of the legs and mouldings are solid mahogany, and the sides/tops are mahogany veneer.



With all these signs of quality, I was incredibly surprised to find that there were absolutely NO markings on the pieces except for pencilled numbers. Some of the chairs are numbered "9310" and the smaller cabinet is numbered "9312".



From what I can tell, it says "9312 Bottom" "Nov 5 1945" "RossKerr" and something along the lines of: "Like is nany Chuck" (?) These were the only markings I could find.





I had thought that the pink and gold-green fabric on the seats was original, but one of the torn ones proved otherwise.

The fabric is actually dark pinkish red, with the green added afterwards. In some of the excessively worn-out places, the bright pink shows through a lot. The green stripes almost look like ribbons. It's quite an interesting/nice fabric and it goes well with the set.





Here's that other piece. I don't have room for this one, so it will be used in another room.



Now, my final thoughts on the set: It's kind of big. I was surprised how much space the table takes up with the chairs. I will have to rearrange the pieces, because currently the sideboard is so deep on that side that I can't even open a drawer half way, or pull-out a chair properly. The table is off-centre from the room by 4" (because the window and light fixture are 4" off) so it might work better on the opposite side (since I'll gain that 4"). Worst case scenario is that I have to "get rid of" (move to another room) the sideboard. I don't really understand why it's so deep in the first place. It's about 21" deep, while the hutch is only 17" deep.

Then there's the freebies. The chair has definitely seen better days.

The fabrics don't even match, and the upholstery job on the seat is just terrible. Look at all the creases and bunching on the right corner, and on the back left side.







Pierre tells me that the greenish gold velvet isn't original because it's textured velvet.



Note the crack in the stretcher below. The whole chair is rickety and falling apart. The finish isn't the best either, but it has potential to be really nice. The casters have brass wheels.



The coffee table. This one I'm not too fussy about, but I love the cute little casters with the square tips. The table looks like solid mahogany (no veneers), and the top might be leather. It looks and feels like it's fake, but there's a deep gouge in it at one end, and it seems fuzzy, so it could be real leather.

Note broken corner moulding.



The finish on it is in horrible shape (both the wood, and the thick varnish coating over the leather).



That's it for now, but I also had some houses/buildings I'll be posting soon.

Shop Hutch Update

Today I decided to spend the afternoon and early evening (it's 8pm and I just quit for the day) working some more on the "shop storage hutch".

It's turning out to be much more of a rustic antique reproduction than I had originally planned, but that's alright.

Today I cut and installed the back for the upper section, cut and installed a centre support, trimmed and hung the doors (they still need fine tuning), and installed the 5 upper face frame pieces (the ones over the doors).

Here's the photo of the hutch from the last time I worked on it. In this pic, I had the 5 doors just propped into the door openings as a preview.



And here's all I got done from today:



I LOVE the old "doors" (old windows). I often see people throwing away these old basement windows, and I try to pick them up whenever I can. I have another larger one which I might also make into another cabinet. And as a quick reminder, this entire cabinet is being made essentially from trash. I'm using anything available (old barn wood, rough painted scrap pine, 2x4s, old plywood with nail holes, used baseboards, etc). The only items I paid for were the hardware (brass hinges/catches), a few new sheets of glass, and the paint.





A few of them will need new glass. Two have a cracked glass, but they are clean breaks, and I like the old wavy glass, so I won't bother to change them.



Lastly, it's hard to convey the size in just photos. The hutch is 8 feet tall, and 8 feet wide (I'm 6' when I'm not slouching).



Still left to do:

- Cut, bead, and hang the 4 bottom doors.
- Make/install 3 or 4 drawers in centre of base.
- Make/install some kind of crown moulding.
- Paint.

Cherry Bookcase Project (Part 4)

Alright, first off, if you're just joining me now, you can check out parts 1, 2, and 3 here:

http://my1923foursquare.blogspot.ca/2013/02/cherry-bookcase-project.html
http://my1923foursquare.blogspot.ca/2013/03/cherry-bookcase-project-part-2.html
http://my1923foursquare.blogspot.ca/2013/03/bookcase-update-another-oil-painting.html

Yesterday I left you guys with a bit of a teaser, and I'm not sure that too many of you have seen it yet, but too bad, since I'm doing the follow-up now. :P

On the last post, I had finished sanding the bottom case (the main bookcase part of the overall cabinet), installed the mouldings, and the bottom was basically done except for the shelves and back.

Since then, I went through what wood I had left, worked out some dimensions, and decided I should have just enough wood to build an upper glazed case (that's glazed as in glass doors, not frosted doughnuts) and I started building it.

I needed quite a bit of long pieces for all the mouldings, and horizontal stretchers, so I decided to use-up this cherry board that I picked up YEARS ago at a yard sale. It was a slightly warped and flawed board (crack down the centre), and not very wide. I had originally thought that I'd use it for a clock case, but antique clocks are RARELY ever made from cherry, so this project was as good a project as any to use it up.

Because of the extremely limited stock of cherry, the upper case isn't going to be all that useful for books. The interior case will only be about 7 5/8" wide on the exterior, leaving me with a shelf/interior of 6 1/2" (because of the back and the front frame taking up the other inch). Some books would definitely fit on 6 1/2" deep shelves, like novels, but I don't have that many of those. Most of my library consists of larger reference books. Instead, I'll likely use the upper case to display small clocks or collectibles.

The following photo shows the basic box for the upper case along with 6 scrap pieces of 1/4" cherry veneered panels. I could make a 6 panel back for the upper case, but I'm not sure whether or not it would look too busy.



Here you can see how I made the top of the case with a jigsaw puzzle of different boards. Why? Because I wanted the extra height. Parts of it are solid wood, and others are particle board (with cherry veneer). All are leftovers. I was also planning to do a matching string detail as the bottom case, so the harsh line between the different parts won't show.



Next, doors. With a constantly dwindling stock of old/new wood, each piece had to be measured and carefully picked. A few of the door frame pieces have screw holes (on the back or edges) that will mostly be hidden. They're held together with a simple butt-joint and dowels.



I always like to do a fair amount of research (since I'm so picky and I want to get the "most bang for my buck", or rather: effort in this case, since most of the stock was free). I wanted traditional looking glazed doors, but preferably without the multi-piece glass and complicated joinery. I've always loved Gothic pieces, and I don't own ANYTHING AT ALL with Gothic carvings or aesthetics, so since the base was pretty plain, I could do Gothic tracery in the upper doors without having it look "wrong" or mismatched. I went through 3-4 books (Antiques, Early American Furniture, Furniture of Old Quebec, etc) and copied several nice designs, and I also have a stock of nearly 150 internet photos of antique bookcases, so I had many options. In the end, I went with this pattern:



The top mouldings mainly came out of that yard sale board I mentioned earlier.



All 8 demi-arcs were taken out of the two upper panels from the previous side panel, and as a side note, the two bottom panels got turned into the sides for the upper case.

To make the segments, I used my drawing to make a pattern, and traced out the pieces. All the "grid" portions of the doors are 3/8" thick.



I won't even pretend that these doors were "easy" to make. They were assembled in a fairly simple manner, but they were still a total time-consuming pain in the ass to do.

All the grid pieces were cut to be 1/2 the door thickness (3/8 in this case, for a 3/4" thick door) and longer on the ends so that they extended 1/4" into the door frame (on the inside), to match-up with my 1/4" rabbet to hold the glass. It's hard to explain, but in photos that will be in "Part 5" you'll see this better.

All the joints for the grids are half lap joints. The notches are cut on the 1/4" ends, and matching notches are cut into the door frame edges. In the following photo, all 4 arcs have been notched and fitted on the upper points. "H" (the second arc) is also half-lapped over the top of "G" instead of being notched into the door frame. "G" continues into the frame, but "H" does not. Again, you can see this better later.

The pine horizontal bar is just a temporary one for measurements. With the 4 arcs in their places, I then traced a vertical line on each one. The interior door width is exactly 16" (which worked out beautifully). Divided into 4=4" You can see the 4" reference lines at the top.



4 arcs cut and sanded smooth along that edge.





Next, the 4 arc "pairs" were glued together along their long flat edges (using clothes pins and masking tape). Once glued, they were lightly sanded, and trimmed to length.

The centre bars were done next (and were done AFTER in case there was a bit of deviation in the arches L-R (in case they were slightly off centre from my 4" marks).

Note: nothing is glued yet. Those office clips worked out awesomely.



Next, the last pieces were the two bottom bars. These were cut to fit tightly, and push the arches up into their corners as much as possible (you want a snug fit, not one that's so tight it will deform/force things).

Again, half-lap joints were used. since I have 3 pieces coming together at the middle crosses, the middle joint was done with a diagonal cut (one on the top arch pieces, and one on the bottom bars).

I *COULD* have divided the 3/8" pieces all into 1/8 sections, and had all 3 pieces slot together, but it would have been a lot more work, and this was just as strong.



Yesterday's teaser photo:





At this point, the door grids were done and ready to glue, but I only glued them today. Also note that I haven't yet installed the upper bead detail, or sanded the putty on the crown. The doors and grids will also be routed to match the bottom doors. I'm also pondering adding a crest with 3 finials in a Hepplewhite-inspired style.

Knobs for the upper and lower doors will be hand-turned cherry ones, as will the finials (if I make some).