Location: Benjamin, Utah

Hobbyist or Pro: Pro

Project Name: Hand Carved Armoire

Wood Species: Alder

Finish Used: I finished it first with a wipe-on stain, then used a dark brown glaze.

Project Description:
A designer in Wyoming, who I have worked with before, contacted me for this custom armoire. The client wanted an Indian and some elk with mountains. The home is in Wilson, Wyoming and they wanted to bring some of the outdoors into their newly remodeled home. The inside accommodates a 50 inch flat screen TV with multiple drawers for storage. The doors are bi-fold, and lay flat against the outside, and are carved from 2″ material. When the doors are closed, the carving on the outside appears to be one seamless image.

Project Description:
Dovetailing:
Top & bottom case (router-cut), drawers (router-cut), drawer dividers (router-cut), base (hand-cut)…I wanted to experiment with both methods. The hand-cut definitely look more refined, but it was nice to have the router/jig since I had so many dovetails to cut on the rest of the piece. The upper & lower case dovetails are hidden so it didn’t really matter. I think it would have looked a little nicer with hand-cut dovetails on the drawers.

Doors:
The raised/”bookmatched” panels were a first for me…the panels aren’t resawn bookmatch (I don’t have a bandsaw with resaw capabilities)…I just pulled a bunch of wood and spent a few hours making up the bookmatch (i.e., composing with grain)…that was a lot of fun

Door & drawer pulls:
The pulls are ebonized walnut (another first for me). The ebonizing process was easy…I found an article on the FWW website. I used a convex router bit to cut the profile.

Case backs:
Lower case back is made of ship-lapped poplar (another first!)…Upper case back is walnut plywood…I’m not a big fan of using plywood, but that was a lot of visible space to fill so I experimented with the plywood. If I had had the materials, I probably would have gone with ship-lapped walnut. That’s probably the main thing I’d redo on the piece. Isn’t there always something?

Something to note:
I had to make the doors twice. That was a bitter pill to swallow! The first set of door frames twisted on me bad. I couldn’t figure out how to fix them, so I tore the doors apart and rebuilt the frames. The original panels in the doors were just flat, so I decided on the new doors to do raised panels. It worked out great and made the door rebuild a tolerable process!

As a Guild member, here are some of the areas where Marc assisted me:
- Design advice on adding additional upper & lower moldings to the upper case. Compare the before & after. The additional moldings really give the piece more interest (texture) & balance.

- Advice on how to mount the door and drawer pulls (glued & doweled through as well as glued on the back-side of the pulls)
- Finishing advice – I basically used your “simple varnish finish” process using General Finishes “Arm-R-Seal”.

Not sure if this qualifies as a Viewer Project but I have a different twist on woodworking. Instead of going to the lumber yard, about 80% of my projects are from recycled wood. I live in Plano Texas and I drive around on country roads looking for old vacant homes that where built in the early 1900’s. Once I find one, I start knocking on doors until I find who owns the land and home and get their permission to take some wood. Most of the wood is old growth southern pine. It’s a lot of work cleaning up the boards because in the early days, they used small tacks to hang the cheesecloth wallpaper, but it adds that distressed look that looks pretty cool.

The bed and end tables where made about 10 years ago. The dresser/entertainment/bookshelf I just now completed to match the other bedroom furniture. The cool thing about this wood is the tight grain pattern and patina (because of the large amount of rosin) for pine. You just can’t find pine like this today.

Now here is the interesting thing about the piece I just completed. I designed it for the bookshelves to be on each side of the large piece, as you can see in the photo. When I put it in the room, my wife said “it looks great…but, I want the center piece angled in the corner and put the two bookshelves together”. I told her that is not the way I designed it and she said, “I know but that is the way I like it”. Now I did what any successfully married man of 23 years would do. I stood up tall, bowed out my chest, folded my arms and said, “Yes Dear!” I hope you enjoy.

Back in 1999, my wife wanted a nice bedroom suite. I happily looked into it for her, and was shocked at the cost of a full bedroom suite. Anywhere from $3,000 to $4,500. And surely none of them were actually solid wood. I had just started my hobby of woodworking, and so I asked my wife if she was willing to have a piece made one at a time. She said she would be. I designed the first piece, the armoire, and then asked her what type of wood she wanted. She said knotty pine. Sweet, I thought, that is the cheapest wood in the world. First I made the armoire, then we moved. I then made the dresser and a few months later, I made the end tables. All of this within about 2 years. (hey, I was in the Army, and I was busy defending my country.)

Anyhow, I never made the bed because I had bought a nice and inexpensive wrought iron bed, picked up at a garage sale. Earlier this year though, I decided it was about time to finish the bedroom suite. I designed the bed to be very simple, but with the same raised panel styling I had used in the other pieces. It took me many nights and weekends, but in the end, I think it turned out pretty good. All of the lumber was purchased at Lowes or Home Depot. Each piece had three staining layers of Minwax Golden Oak. With three layers of polyurethane, semi-gloss.

Needless to say, my wife is very pleased, and I am happy to have the whole suite completed. As a side note, my wife told me a few years ago that the only reason she agreed to let me build the suite way back when was because, as she says, “I didn’t really think you could do it, so I said yes so that I didn’t hurt your feelings.” I guess it’s easy to please someone with low expectations!

This jewelry armoire was a graduation gift for my niece. It is made out of Bubinga, Birds Eye Maple veneer (door panels), figured maple veneer (top), and Birds Eye maple (drawer fronts). Each drawer is dovetailed and the bottom drawer has a hidden compartment accessible from the back. The base is from a David Marks project Open Bookcase. The finish is Seal-A-Cell with several coats of Gel Stain on top. I was in way over my head on this project which means I got to learn many new things.