The Monrovia Festival, 2009

I got a little booth at the Monrovia Festival this year. Above is a pic of me and my display. I wasn't really sure that what I have to offer would go over well. A town festival isn't usually the sort of venue that people go to to look for furniture. Especially my own sort of one-off designs.

The whole thing turned out much better than I expected, however. I sold several pieces when I was really just hopeful for a couple of sales. I had to print more business cards as we went through what we had the first day.

The attendance was much larger than I expected, or remembered from previous years. I'm getting the feeling that people are choosing to attend smaller, local events like the Monrovia Festival, rather than drive farther, and spend more money at larger, events, or on travel and vacations. It seems that the failing economy is likely to force a re-invigoration of local economies and small scale crafts, as world-spanning businesses and supply chains become less viable.
This suites me just fine.
I also think that when people choose to spend their money, they will more and more pick items which are of higher quality, are unique, and will hold their value. I may just be projecting my wishes on the world here, but, I think, in an economy that is reality-based, and not a castle-in-the-sky of financial fantasy, long lasting items with character will have an edge over the mass-produced non-working replicas of real products which fill the bigboxes now.

Here is a coffee table and mantle shelf I brought to the Festival. Both are from salvaged materials.
The coffee table is poplar,(top and apron), cedar and ash,(legs). Legs are an interesting find. They were cut from 4x4 beams that served as floor joists in a little barn that was torn down, and then dumped at the home of a friend of mine. He was just going to use the wood in a bonfire for a party, but he let me rummage through it first, knowing I love to salvage useful things, and I pulled out four beams. Three cedar and one ash.
the ash is pale and pretty straight, but the cedar is wainy and had lots of old checking and fractures. As soon as I cut it, it filled the shop with the scent of cedar oil, even though it's who knows how old.

The Mantle Shelf is white oak, and walnut, also an interesting story. The shelf itself was once part of a door frame in my basement, easily cut 160 years ago. I had to pull out the frame last fall to get the new furnace in. We also had to widen the opening in the wall, so the old frame couldn't go back.

In the pic, you can see the shallow curve of the saw blade that cut the plank in the first place. When I get some thing that proves the age and character of a piece of wood, I never take all of it off in the refinishing process. I love that sort of thing.

On the right end of the shelf, which you can't see in the picture, there is a large iron spike that was driven in to the door frame at some time. I don't know what for, but it looks great, and it's nearly impossible to get something like that out of old oak, so I left it in.

The corbels that support the shelf are walnut, and pieces I salvaged from the remains of a very old player piano. Just how old that piano was, I don't know, but most of it had collapsed into dust when I took it apart.


Here is a pair of tables/stools made of ash and cedar. Ash tops and cedar legs. The ash is from a downed tree back in the woods. It came down three years ago, and I'm pretty sure the ash borers are to blame for it's death. I'm seeing quite a few dying ash trees on the property now.

A log of that size, parts of it are more than two feet in diameter, needs a few years to dry out enough to be stable for furniture building. There was still some checking that appeared after I cut some plates for the tops, but I doubt it will cause any problems down the line.
The legs are from a standing dead cedar that was near by. It had been out competed for sunlight under the forest canopy and was already nice and dry. Also, the cedar oil is a great rot inhibitor.
I used an antique draw knife belonging to a friend to shave the legs down to a diameter for the tenons that plug into the mortises in the undersides of the plates. I had to use my clamping table to hold the legs while I shaved them, and it was a pain in the neck. Building a proper shaving horse for the shop is definitely on my too-do list now.

Platform bed on casters.

This is a platform bed I built just a little while ago for my Mother-in-law. She had just got a new queen mattress, and since her old bed was a double, needed a new frame.

She wanted the bed to be low, with no box spring, so we went with a platform design. She also wanted to be able to move it around without too much trouble, so, the casters.

To keep the cost low, I built it out of standard dimensional lumber. It has a headboard, footboard, side rails and a plywood platform with extra support feet in the middle.

I used the through-bolt system for the attachment points. Each side rail has a long threaded bolt centered in the end, and a wood dowl above and below it. The bolt enters the end post of the head and foot boards and is pulled tight with a washer and nut from the out side. In the pics you can see the hole for the nuts in the corner posts. I usually cover these with a brass rosette, but I forgot them when we took the bed up.

Around the inside of the headboard, footboard, and side rails is a 1x2 support strip for the edge of the platform to rest on. The platform is in two pieces, so that I didn't have to wrestle a queen size sheet of plywood up to the third floor.

A center support runs up the middle of the bottom of the platform, and four posts support it to ensure that there is no bowing.

The stain is minwax Ebony, with a finish of four coats of satin polyurethane. The weather was hot and sunny when I was finishing this bed, and I like to use the sun to "bake-on" each coat of finish.
I set up a pair of ladders in the back yard and ran plywood sheets through them so as to hold the pieces up facing south. I like to make sure the finish is thoroughly mixed and warm and thin before applying it. It also helps if the wood is warm as well. This gives you a nice even coat that doesn't harden too soon.
I also sand lightly between coats, the end product has a much smoother feel if you take the time to do it right.
A final hand rubbing with a sheet of corrugated cardboard, ripped into two sheets, gives you just enough abrasion to bring up a nice shine.

This bed will break down easily for transport with a ratchet and socket with an extension. In use, you will find that a bed put together like this, instead of the more common hook and eye type connection, is rock solid. This bed does not creak, wiggle or bow. If at any point in the future, wood shrinkage loosens the joints, a half-turn on the nuts will pull it up snug again.

The Wall Shelf Unit.

My lovely wife wanted a wall unit similar to a modular one that she saw in a Pottery Barn catalogue. I looked over the pottery barn design, and decided it could use some improvement.

Their unit consisted of stackable, H shaped pieces that could be set side-by-side to create a wider shelf.
It wasn't a bad design on the whole, but it had no base of any sort, and the pieces were just veneered particle board.
I hate particle board. It has no strength to speak of, absorbs any moisture it comes in contact with, and it weighs a lot more than an equal size piece of solid wood. You can't even safely compost it because of the glue and chemicals that hold it together. I suppose there must be some application that justifies the existence of particle board, but I don't know what that might be. Ballast, maybe.

The shelf unit pictured is made from 2x12 lumber that was edged and sanded for a cleaner look.
Instead of side by side and stacked units, I made each level a single unit. Side by side is never stable.

I built a separate base unit for the shelf units to stand on also. No part of the floors in this old house are completely flat. No part of the floors in 90% of new houses are flat either, but that's a different grumble.

Having a base unit gives better support for the upper units. It's much easier to shim and level a continuous foot, than it would be to do so for five floor touching uprights.
I set out the uprights to divide the shelf spaces in a pattern of four,four,three,two, one, from the floor to the ceiling. Visually, this puts the greatest mass of the piece lower to the ground and keeps it more open towards the ceiling. This looks nice, and it puts the maximum support on the bottom.

This is not a light weight piece of furniture. 2x12s are normally used for floor joists and such, but the idea was to make something with a feeling of solidity, and nothing can really simulate that impression. It takes mass. Mass survives.

This was my first attempt at a wall unit like this, and it's not quite as polished as I would have liked. I did learn a few things doing it though, and the next one will be sharper.

I put two coats of black satin on it, and then a poly finish, lightly sanding between coats. I didn't give it any contrasting high lights since it wasn't meant to appear like an old piece.

My to-do list includes building another similar unit for the other side of the chimney. I don't know when I'll have time to get to that. I've resigned myself to the fact that the to-do list will in fact, never be done. It grows like kudzu.

A new set of Wine Crate End Tables.

I just finished a new set of the wine crate tables and I'm pretty pleased with them. Again, I tried some new design ideas, and though I probably won't repeat them in exactly the same way the next time, I did learn some things.
These crates are from Familia Cara, they have an image of a nice Italian family dressed in clothes of around 1890 on the sides. It's an ink print instead of burned on, but it's mostly clear and looks nice. The crates have good finger joint corners, which always add visual interest and plenty of strength.


I've decided to start assigning stock numbers to each of the tables I build. No two of them is exactly the same as any other, and it will help to be certain about which piece we're talking about when I have to answer questions. So, above on the left is WCET10, and on the right is WCET11. That's straightforward enough.
The main differance between these two is that WCET10 has a narrower trestle bar than WCET11, and WCET11 uses rounded dowel pins through the tenons, while WCET10 has square ones. They are that way, because that's how the materials I had on hand were.
I don't have a pattern for the parts, I just freehand all the cuts. I have to say, though, that I'm thinking of making patterns of some of my favorite curves and shapes. Just to make things go faster when I'm not breaking new ground in my plans.



I really got lucky with finding the wood for the legs on these two tables. It's pine, and while it's new lumber, It's from a very large, old tree. The growth rings in the wood are very closely spaced, and very curly. Nothing like the run of the mill you usually find in a place like Menard's, which is where I got it. I spent half an hour rooting through the low quality planks and found it in the bottom of the pile. I suppose it was in there because it had a wainy spot on one side. That sort of thing is no disqualifier for me though, It just adds character to my way of thinking.
I restack all the planks I've gone through when I'm done, I've worked retail before and inconsiderate customers just add to the trials of that sort of work.
It did have a great deal of sap in it though, and I knew that would be a problem for the sanding and finishing, and it was. This much resin in the wood smells great, but once it heats up from sanding, it gums up paper faster than you can replace it. To get rid of as much of the resin on the surface as I could, I first rubbed the wood with acetone and scrapped it. It helped some, but the sanding still used up a lot of paper.

Here's a shot with the top off to show the inside of the table. I didn't stain the inside of the crates, but they did get a coat of satin polyurethane. The stain used on the outside is minwax provincial, a nice medium color. There are three coats of satin poly on the outside.

Instead of having cutouts for the feet, this time I added a second piece of wood to give it some extra weight and stability. I think with the next crate tables I will combine the two and have some sort of heavy foot and decorative cutouts.

I think the crate table design is evolving toward a "best combination of features" design. It will be something strong, comfortable in appearance, and with practical uses.

I will be very interested to see what it looks like.

I'm going to put this pair up on ebay to see what I can get for them. I'm also considering etsy, since it seems to be dedicated to handmade things only.

The Pallet Shelf.

This is a simple little wall shelf. It has somewhat mission-like lines, square edges, simple corbels, a solid back. The only thing that's different about it is that it's made entirely of red oak from a shipping pallet. I think the pallet was from a shipment of auto parts dad ordered, or maybe his heat pump.

Anyway, lots of pallets are made of low grade red oak. It's durable, and the pallet can be in use for quite a while. Eventually though, they crack, or come apart and get thrown away. I don't know if anyone recycles pallets. They're put together with spiral nails shot by air guns and those are very difficult to get out. Especially with oak, it's tenacious about holding on to nails, once they've been driven in.

You would have to have equipment that could handle cutting through lots of metal, and then you'd probably only be able to make mulch with the remains. Unless you were willing to spend the time prying or cutting a pallet apart by hand for the salvageable parts, like me.

I can't help but at least try to do things the hard way. I'm not right.

After some planeing and sanding, the parts for the shelf looked quite nice. You never know what's hidden under the dirt and grit on an old piece of oak. Most of the pallet just wasn't salvageable, too many splits and knots, but enough was solid for a small project. The rest of it fed the wood stove in the shop.

You never know though, when a piece of material that looks usable only for heating, may have a hidden beauty underneath the grime. Here's to diamonds in the rough.

The Van Gogh end table

This is a little end table that was fun to build, or at least interesting, which is the same thing to me. I learned a few things that will be applied to future builds and I think I'd like to use this same general idea on a lot of other projects. A library table comes to mind. Maybe one with scenes from famous books inset in the apron wrapping around the underside.

The top of this table is actually a sample raised panel that my mom picked up at a yard sale. It's beech, a tight grained wood that is often used as a substitute for cherry.

The picture frame aprons are pine, just stock 1x2 material. I picked it out for it's straight grain and clean look. The images themselves are all paintings by Van Gogh, clipped to size in photoshop, and printed on heat transfer sheets. The sheets are then ironed on to 1/4 inch plywood backs that are inset in the backs of the frame aprons like a picture would be. I ran a chamfered edge moulding around the inside of the frames and stained it to bring out a contrast with the paintings. I had to make the moulding since I didn't have anything on hand that would fit, that was tedious.

The legs are pencil posts with a sharper inner angle. They are again reclaimed fir 2x4s with many nail holes and chips. The top is stained, but I painted the legs and aprons with a dark brown called "expresso". It's a great color, but I won't use that company's paint again because it was a terrible pain to get spread on evenly. It took four coats before I was satisfied.

The legs bolt on and come off easily. This time I used wing nuts, so no wrench is needed.

I've come to really like Van Gogh. I didn't care for expressionism when I was younger. Everything is expressionist in the morning before you find your glasses, and I couldn't see what was all that great about that. I have nice scans of some of his lesser known works now, and I'd like to use them in something. I just don't know if my wife will like the skeleton smoking a cigarette, or the earless self portrait.

Wine crate end table with legs.

This is the first wine crate end table that I built. I did this one with four tapered pencil post legs before I decided the renaissance trestle style worked better for the wine crates.
The legs are reclaimed fir, sawed down from old 2x4s with nail holes and oxidation stains left in, I like them better that way.
The stain is very light, Minwax Ipswitch pine. It hardly darkened the wood at all. I tend to like darker stains, but I thought I'd give this one a try. The table was meant for a room with a dark wood floor and brown walls and I figured a light colored piece of furniture would help brighten the room.

The legs on this table bolt on and are removable. The pieces of the apron are screwed and glued to the plate that the crate sits on. a corner brace connects with each part of the apron and a threaded bolt pulls the leg tightly into a triangle formed from the aprons and the brace.

I learned this design for attaching legs when I was working for an Amish furniture dealer. The Amish used this design on all the leg tables they made, from end tables to twenty seat dining tables and I think it's the strongest leg joint you can have. A little piece like the wine crate end only needs a single bolt in the corner, but bigger legs use two or three.

As the table ages, or due to temperature and humidity variations, the wood may shrink or expand, but this joint requires only a quarter turn on the nuts to keep it snugged up tight.

The top comes off to access the crate for storage, and this one is currently full of photo albums, you know, physical pictures, from before we let them pile up on the hard drive unseen.

My dog wants a bite of your sandwich.

Give the Pupster some sandwich, and a chip, he likes chips.

Sofa Table.

A sofa table or hall table is what you call any tall narrow occasional table. The usually stand along a wall, or behind a couch to hold miscellaneous stuff, key bowls, candles, books, etc...

This one I did for the living room, and my wife is loath to part with it, though I will gladly replicate it should anybody want one.

I say replicate, because there isn't any way to make a copy. The top of this table is made up of three planks of red cedar that weathered outside for at least forty years. They were shelves in a plant stand my grandfather made for his green house. When the stand finally had enough, and fell over, I pulled it apart to see what I could do.

I took of at least an eighth of an inch of soft silver surface wood before I reached the inner heart that wasn't burned by UV. It has a deep reddish leathery color that only time brings.

I tied the planks together on the under side with wood straps instead of jointing them and gluing them up into a solid top. It looks more rustic.

The legs and apron are ripped down fir 2x4s from salvage. They are a tapering square, like a pencil post leg, but the inner sides tapper more sharply than the outside. It helps to make the table look more open.

Before I painted the legs and apron, I first ran a bit of barn red paint along the edges and corners. Then after I gave it a couple coats of black satin over that, I rubbed along the edges with steel wool to let the red just barely show. It's a bit too subtle to show in the photo, you don't even notice it unless you're looking for it.

The top got several coats of satin polyurethane, and that really brought out the deep color of the wood. I'm pretty happy with this one overall, I just have to find more old cedar now.

The Pantry.

I just about bit off more than I could chew with this one. Part of the Perpetual Ongoing Remodel is the kitchen. We needed more storage for dry goods and cans, so I decided to build a free standing pantry, like a large armoire.
Large in this case ended up being eight foot six inches tall, by four feet wide, by twenty two inches deep. I couldn't stand it upright in the shop, and I had to call my brother over to help get it into the house.

I don't know what it weighs, but I don't want to move it again.

It has five adjustable shelves inside, and is open all the way across. Nearly everything in the kitchen fit inside it with room to spare. The stain is an early American, with a satin finish. All the door panels have several coats of chalkboard paint on them for doodles and lists. The knobs are oak with a few coats of black enamel.

As you see it in this picture, the pantry isn't completely finished. I plan on building a second short cabinet that will bolt to the side of it and cross the top of the refrigerator to attach to the wall. Then I will add crown moulding and a single top to both pieces.

This, like the picture panel bookcase, was entirely new wood. I would like to do a pantry or cupboard in salvaged wood, but the right pieces haven't come along yet. I'm patient though, they'll show up eventually.

Rough work.

This mirror frame was a fast and rough build that only took a couple hours. I had the mirror sitting around for a long time without a frame and I got tired of having to move it when it got in the way.
The frame was a single old yellow pine plank with one end broken and one end clean. I ripped it lengthwise on the table saw and then chopped it into nearly equal lengths on the miter saw.

I ran a quarter inch rabbet groove around the inside and brought it together with pocket screws and a little glue.
I gave the frame a scrubbing with steel wool to deepen the unevenness in the grain and then a coat of stain. No finish on this one, I wanted it to look flat, like old barn wood.

I have another, much larger mirror to frame yet, that one will be a much more careful project.
I'm thinking maybe something sort of Arts & Crafts, a Green brothers look maybe. We'll see.

Small Chest.

This is a little chest that's made completely from reclaimed wood. It's dimensions were dictated by the sizes of the pieces I had.
The front and back are yellow pine, and the sides are poplar, all from old closet shelves I tore out in the Perpetual Ongoing Remodel.
The top is a piece of white oak cut from a cast off table leaf I found in the garage of another house where I was refinishing the floors.

I smoothed the surfaces of all these pieces, but not completely. They had many years of scratches, dings, and abrasions that I like to leave in for character.



The joints in the corners are a very old lap type joint. The sides are cut back about a third of the way up from the floor the width of the fronts and back. You see this kind of join on viking sea chests and other ancient cased goods. It's strong and simple, kind of like one huge dove tail.

I glued and screwed the joints as well and covered the screw heads with maple buttons. I trimmed off the extra with my little Japanese pull saw, then sanded the buttons flush with the surface.
There isn't any stain on the chest, just a couple coats of satin polyurethane.
The poplar sides were already dark with age. Poplar gets a warm vanilla Carmel color with time and these already had dark green streaks from mineral deposition as the tree grew.

These were all single planks, not boards made up of joined pieces, the growth rings run all the way across the planks. Unless you go to a sawmill , and order what you need, you're not going to find that today.

We wasted most of the giant old growth forests of North America building things that no longer exist today. I think that if you're going to cut down a tree that has grown for 300 or 600 years, whatever you make out of it ought to be well built enough to last that long as well.

Bookcase with picture panel sides

I wanted to do a bookcase with more visual appeal than usual, but without adding frivolous scroll work or medallions or do-dads. I like raised panels sides in furniture to draw the eye, but I also like the idea of a thing reflecting or hinting at what it contains. At first, I was going to have prints of the covers of classic first edition books in all the panels, but, as it turns out, classic first editions generally have very boring covers.

You can't go wrong with pulp magazine covers though. They all have bright colors and vibrant illustration. You can stare at the sides of this bookcase and get sucked into the stories without even taking a book out.

All of these images are from large scans that I printed on heat transfers and ironed directly on the plywood inner walls of the case. This bookcase is really overbuilt, having both an inner cabinet carcass and an outer face frame. I always tend to use more material than is actually necessary. I like things that can take a lot of abuse, and it's mass that survives the ravages of time, not engineering.



This bookcase has fixed shelves in it, but the next one will be adjustable. I need the proper jig to drill the holes for the shelf clips. If they aren't even on both sides, the shelves will slant.

Most of the material in this, I bought new. The idea of what I wanted just didn't fit with any of the wood I had on hand. The baseboard is a salvaged 2x6 though.

The paint is two coats of black satin over a flat white base coat. Then it got two coats of satin polyurethane.


Here is a close up on one of the panels. The moisture content of the wood has to be considered when you use heat transfers. Old dry wood will take it flat and evenly, but, if there is more water present in the wood, it will steam up and change the texture of the print. This isn't necessarily a bad thing , partial melting and cooling of the transfer gives it a look like heavily brushed oil paint. That looks better with subject matter like Treasure Island than Science Fiction Quarterly.

I really like how this experiment came out, and I plan to use the same technique in other pieces. The only limit I'm running into is the size of the image I can print at home. I think I'll be happy to play around with what I can do for a while before I start looking for a larger printer though.

Wine Crate end tables.

My wife brought me home some used wine crates once, and I kicked them around a while until I decided what to use them for. The crates vary in size and construction depending on who's wine they held originally. Some just have nailed corners, and others have finger joints. They often have terrible sticky tags pasted on them that take a lot of scraping to remove.

The Winery names are some times burned into the wood with a hot iron, and some are printed on. I give them a lite sanding to smooth out the surface a bit and remove splinters, but I'm careful not to take off the ink. The names and logos are half the appeal of repurposing stuff like this.

The one at the top of the post is an early one. It's legs and trestle bar were some old poplar shelves from a closet I ripped out of the house, the top was new pine. I just did a simple trefoil cut out in the feet for decoration. Medieval looks are always my first inclination.

The fleur de lis cutouts came out nicely, but they were a big pain in the neck. I probably won't do them again unless I'm feeling real patient, or somebody wants to buy one.

The tops come off all of these so you can use the crate for storage. I put a rim of wood around the bottom of the lid so that it stays put unless you lift it off. I think I'll put hinges on one in the future to see how that goes. I think it may require reinforcing the crate wall on some of them, they are often less than a quarter inch thick.

The crates also often have knots in them, so I don't shy away from using similarly knotted wood for the tops and legs. After stain and several coats of a nice satin finish, it all blends together nicely.

This pair is actually a set I sold to a lady who gave them as gifts. Wine people really like this stuff. It tends to come out with a sort of naive, rustic feel to it. I think that's one of my own preferences in furniture design as well. Honesty and simplicity in form and function, no unneeded flourishes.

Oak wall shelf with prints in panels.

This is a close up of the right side panel in the wall shelf, to show the image a bit better. The painting is a Monet called Bodmer Oak. I printed it on a heat transfer on my little hp printer. Since the max width of the print and the panel were so close, I cut sections of the painting across in photoshop and reversed one side. Also, sliding down the image a bit so that both panels, side by side, would look like one wide scene.

The shelf itself, is made of very old white oak that I salvaged from a friend's remodeling of his farm house. The wood was rough sawn on site originally from the shallow arc of the saw teeth. I left in the old nail holes and the oxidation stains, because I like them!

The panel frame part is fir reclaimed from my own ongoing and perpetual remodel of my own home. I'll probably post some pics of that at some time. I forget how much work I've put into this place until I look over the pictures sometimes.

Below is a pic of the shelf itself. I meant for it to go at the top of the post, but I some how got it backwards. Better luck next time, eh?

First Post, What this blog is about.

I've been building furniture for home and for sale for a few years now. My cousin Don visited us recently, and while I was showing him some of the new pieces, he made a comment to the effect that he was starting to see my specific style emerging.

I hadn't really considered that I had a "style" as such, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw he was right.

The choices I made in materials and shapes reflected the things I considered important, and not important, without my starting from a defined aesthetic.

The picture is a coffee table I built that I think of as "the Bigleg". The legs are cut from a 6x6 post that I salvaged from a pole building construction site. The top is made from joined 2x6s that used to be shelves in pallet racking. I always like to use salvaged or reclaimed wood whenever I can get it. It often has character from the dings, nail holes, checking, stains, and weathering it has sustained over time that conveys a sense of history that new things just don't have.

I use new materials when I need them, but I prefer to find a use for what I have, rather than go buy wood for a specific project.

I'm going to post pics of pieces from the shop here as part of my exploration of what my design choices mean in defining the style of what I build, and if a thing is shippable, I'll put a price on it should anyone want one.

Thanks for the thought provocation Don.