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.