Saturday, July 6, 2013

bench and cabinet in reclaimed fir

Part of the remodel of our bungalow, a built in cabinet and bench system leading out onto the south facing side of the house via French doors. Details:

  • 12'long, 36" high cabinet tops, 18" bench with angled back.
  • Finish is Watco Danish Oil.
  • Frame&Panel construction atop birch ply carcass.
  • laminated quartersawn pieces for the cabinet tops using breadboard ends, 7/8" thick
  • Seat back and sides milled from doug fir sent here from my dad up in the Seattle area. Tree came down in a bad wind storm some years ago and he had it milled on site. had a few nice planks for me to use.
  • Rest of the wood came from reclaimed doug fir that I scrounged around for. Urban Ore and Earthsource Lumber
  • I'd never done built in work so had no idea how much fun it was to match up the theoretical straight boards with the empirical geometry of a 1911 bungalow.
winging the miters for the base moulding with my ryoba was not much fun. perhaps a miter box would be a nice thing to have
Here's a foto roll of the work in progress Worked weekends from end of March through today

plywood substrate

I milled this fir from earthsource lumber in san leandro.
the ring density on this stick was too nice to pass up, although i had to chisel out each one of these inch spaced 16penny nails.

Some drawer pull ideas I had. Ended up using the ones integrated into the drawer front

The blum hinges work really well. Thanks Tim for lending my your 35mm forstner bit :-)

The angled frame/pannel sides were a bitch
I don't have a concave making plane so I did this using my plough plane to define the shoulders and then a block plane to round out the interior space.