Woodworking

22
May 09

Teacup Rack

One random morning a few years ago, I got the itch to build something. My wife has a fetish for teacups, but didn’t have a place to put them. I had recently made her a corner cabinet to display her wedding china and tea service sets, and I thought I’d make something to show off her favorite teacups. We really didn’t have much spare room in our cramped DC apartment, but we had a small area between the pantry and laundry doors in the kitchen. I jotted down this design and got her to sign off on it:

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If I remember correctly, I had some leftover 1x3s and some beadboard from previous projects, so I really only had to buy some molding and hardware.

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18
May 09

Porch Swing

When we lived in our tiny basement apartment on Capitol Hill, we had to maximize every inch of space. We had a little patio that was sunken beneath the deck in the back yard, and there was a space that was too low to stand, but just right for sitting. So when the wife (the fiancée at the time) was out of town planning our wedding, I made her this porch swing as an engagement present:

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Actually, I presented it as a swing that would go with the porch on a house I would buy for her someday.

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6
May 09

Mantel Art

When we lived on Capitol Hill, we kept our copies of the free community monthly, the Hill Rag. The cover art was usually pretty good, and we thought it would be fun to frame them someday. So for an anniversary gift to one another a couple of years ago, I made this piece to rest on the mantle of our new house:

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I made it in such a hurry that I forgot to take pictures of it during construction.

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27
Apr 09

Planter Boxes

We’re finally close to finishing the front porch. After we built a side table and footrest to go with our rocking chair, all we had left to do was build some planter boxes to flank the steps and give us a little privacy. I took care of that this past weekend. This was the original plan:

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It’s designed to look like the terracotta pot is suspended by the upper lip, but it’ll really be sitting on cross bars inside the box.

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20
Apr 09

Front Porch Table & Footrest

My wife and I bought an Adirondack-style rocker for our front porch a couple of months ago and we thought we’d make a side table and footrest to go with it. I made rocking chair footrests for the in-laws last Christmas, so this was a chance to improve upon my design. This was my concept for the side table:

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It’s nothing special; I just want a place to set my drink when I sit down and a place to hang a citronella lantern to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

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15
Apr 09

Guest Bedroom Furniture

My wife and I have lived in tiny one-bedroom apartments since college, and we were at a loss when we bought a house and it came time to decorate a spare bedroom. We decided that we need storage as much as we needed furniture, and we just couldn’t find furniture that maximized the potential of the space. So, naturally, we decided to make a shelving unit that would also serve to store many of her her sewing supplies. This was the design:

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It was to be matching cabinets with bookshelves that incorporated a shelving span over the matching headboard. My in-laws were coming up soon, so I worked overtime to get it all done.

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12
Apr 09

Corner Cabinet

After the wedding, I felt bad because there was nowhere in our cramped DC apartment for my wife to display her gifts. As a matter of fact, it would be over a year before we even took most of them off her parents’ hands. There was one tiny corner in our place where we could put another piece of furniture, if only we could find something small enough to fit in the awkward space. As you might expect, I ended up building it. Here was the design:

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Even though this looks like a simple build, I was worried about making some of the 45° cuts on wobbly sawhorses with a circular saw form the 1970′s.

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7
Apr 09

Grandfather Clock

I always wanted to build a grandfather clock. Maybe it’s just not my style, but I’m not a big fan of furniture that drips with ornamentation. I prefer the simplicity of the colonial and mission styles. With that in mind, I put together a clock a few years ago when my sister and her husband bought a new house. It was to be a simple design that incorporated an electric clock, and it was to serve as practice for the day when I build my own clock. To start, I bought this 50-year-old wall clock off of ebay:

It’s an ugly wall clock that’s supposed to look like a pocket watch. But I didn’t care about the casing; I just wanted the face and clockworks.

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31
Mar 09

Computer Desk

I’ve always toyed around with building and carpentry, but most of my projects were small in scope or fairly simple in design. The first project that I would consider a real piece of furniture was a computer desk I made a few years ago.

When my wife and I moved in together for the first time, we tried to replace as much cheap college furniture as possible. Since we lived in a tiny, one bedroom, basement apartment, there was nowhere to hide the computer. Nothing looks more ‘dorm room’ than having a computer/printer set-up sitting next to your bed or kitchen table, so I decided to make a unit that would look antique and completely hide all traces of electronics. This was the design:

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It was meant to be like a large secretary desk that would hold the monitor in a drop-down position, and the cabinets below would house the tower, printer, and a file cabinet.

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30
Mar 09

My Bar

I got the idea to build a bar for our little backyard patio in DC from a magazine article where a cheap potting bench was transformed into a serving station. I liked the idea, but thought I could do a little better than a converted work station. This was my design:

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What was difficult with this piece wasn’t the building; I threw it together in two days and painted it on the third. The hard part was knowing that it wouldn’t really be finished for years. I tend to get a little obsessive about my projects, and it was hard to accept that I had to quit after 90% of the work was done.

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