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My working deadline for having at least some version of my 15th c. dresser finished is the West-An Tir War held 4th of July weekend. That means this weekend was my last chance to meet the deadline (after three weeks of a crazy work schedule that involved late nights and at least one Saturday). So I've set a reasonable partly-done goal for this event: the main dresser without the upper shelf unit, and possibly without the painted decoration. The first step was to assemble the main cabinet kit from IKEA.
The basic structure will be to add removable legs underneath...
...and then a lower shelf unit with feet.
Since the cabinet has a recessed bottom, the leg plates I'm using for this part are triangular and attach with 5 screws along the edges.
like so:
The feet on the lower shelf will attach with regular square plates. I've cut the shelf to length (it's a smidge wider than the cabinet, but not enough to be worth cutting it down to match), drilled the screw holes for the leg plates, and drilled sockets to receive the ends of the pegs I've glued into the bottom of the legs. The pegs will prevent the units from being knocked apart casually but they don't actually fasten. And I've only left about 1/4" of the pegs sticking out of the legs in order to reduce the chance of them getting snapped off. Because I don't trust the complete interchangeability of my carpentry, I've discretely numbered the legs and their home plates and the corresponding corners of the lower shelf. The numbers won't be visible in use. Here the cabinet is sitting on the lower shelf (but without the lower shelf feet yet).
When I ordered the various legs and feet, I expected them to all come with the hardware attached like this:
Three of the feed had their hardware, but one didn't. The legs had holes drilled for the hardware, but not hardware. And the two longer legs (for a part of the project I'm still designing) had neither hardware nor holes.
The hardware in question is like a screw on one end (the part inserted into the leg) and a bolt on the other (the part screwed into the plate). Now my Favorite Home Depot Guy was able to identify for me what hardware I needed to make up the lack, but his suggestion for inserting it was to put a nut on the bolt portion and ratchet it in using a wrench. The problem with this was that the only style of screw/bolt available had a rather lengthy bolt portion and it would have been too long for my socket wrench.
So just as an experiment, I inserted the bolt portion into my power drill and then used low power to screw it into the drilled hole in the leg/foot. This worked perfectly. Due to the design of the bottom of the cabinet, I didn't need to cut off the excess length on the bolt for those four legs, so I only had to apply a hacksaw to the one lone foot, and to the two larger legs that are set aside for future elaborations.
At this point the legs, feet, and lower shelf were set aside to be varnished before doing any further work. It's too hot to do any work outside at the moment. (Reports say we're at 102F currently.) So I moved on to creating the doors. I'd previously said that the door hinges would be invisible in use but the ones that had the right design and small profile end up with the hinge showing slightly (and therefore taking up a little space on the face of the cabinet, which has consequences that we'll see later). These are spring-loaded kitchen cabinet hinges, shown here sitting on top of one of the shelves that will be turned into doors.
The two outer doors have the hinges attached to the edge of the side of the shelving cabinet. The "doors" are just barely tall enough to overlap the opening just slightly, so I was very careful about lining them up to avoid gaps. Once the two outer doors were attached, I was able to evaluate the constraints on the middle door. The doors themselves ended up being completely flush with each other with no space for a side hinge on the middle door. So my options were a top hinge or a bottom hinge. The bottom hinge would have been less visible and slightly more accessible, but it would create the potential for someone to lean on the open door and splinter the wood. (Yes, my project risk assessments assume that my friends will be clumsy and clueless.) So I went with the upper hinge.
The design of the hinge means that when the middle door is opened all the way, the door holds in place, so the convenience aspect turns out ok, it's just the visibility in an odd location that's non-optimal.
So once the varnishing of the legs and lower shelf is done, I'll have a completed cabinet of this style:
One other part of the project is to add a removable upper shelf unit, to make the whole thing look more like this:
I have plans for how I'm going to do it, but it involves more carpentry than I thought I could get done this weekend (since I also have some tent canvas repairs to do, and I need to make packing lists and figure out which cookbooks to take). The other part is to paint the main side panels and doors with a trompe l'oeil design imitating wood carving. I was thinking originally of doing some fancy gothic tracery, along these lines:
But the more I think about it, the more I'm leaning towards a simple linen-fold design repeating on each panel, more like this:
What I'm thinking of is something of a pen-and-ink drawing effect, using fine parallel lines for the shading. I have an acrylic-paint "pen" to experiment with (and one extra door to use for practice), but I don't want to mess it up by being in a hurry.
Oh, and it's really really hot this weekend, and I'm trying to focus on achievable goals.
The basic structure will be to add removable legs underneath...
...and then a lower shelf unit with feet.
Since the cabinet has a recessed bottom, the leg plates I'm using for this part are triangular and attach with 5 screws along the edges.
like so:
The feet on the lower shelf will attach with regular square plates. I've cut the shelf to length (it's a smidge wider than the cabinet, but not enough to be worth cutting it down to match), drilled the screw holes for the leg plates, and drilled sockets to receive the ends of the pegs I've glued into the bottom of the legs. The pegs will prevent the units from being knocked apart casually but they don't actually fasten. And I've only left about 1/4" of the pegs sticking out of the legs in order to reduce the chance of them getting snapped off. Because I don't trust the complete interchangeability of my carpentry, I've discretely numbered the legs and their home plates and the corresponding corners of the lower shelf. The numbers won't be visible in use. Here the cabinet is sitting on the lower shelf (but without the lower shelf feet yet).
When I ordered the various legs and feet, I expected them to all come with the hardware attached like this:
Three of the feed had their hardware, but one didn't. The legs had holes drilled for the hardware, but not hardware. And the two longer legs (for a part of the project I'm still designing) had neither hardware nor holes.
The hardware in question is like a screw on one end (the part inserted into the leg) and a bolt on the other (the part screwed into the plate). Now my Favorite Home Depot Guy was able to identify for me what hardware I needed to make up the lack, but his suggestion for inserting it was to put a nut on the bolt portion and ratchet it in using a wrench. The problem with this was that the only style of screw/bolt available had a rather lengthy bolt portion and it would have been too long for my socket wrench.
So just as an experiment, I inserted the bolt portion into my power drill and then used low power to screw it into the drilled hole in the leg/foot. This worked perfectly. Due to the design of the bottom of the cabinet, I didn't need to cut off the excess length on the bolt for those four legs, so I only had to apply a hacksaw to the one lone foot, and to the two larger legs that are set aside for future elaborations.
At this point the legs, feet, and lower shelf were set aside to be varnished before doing any further work. It's too hot to do any work outside at the moment. (Reports say we're at 102F currently.) So I moved on to creating the doors. I'd previously said that the door hinges would be invisible in use but the ones that had the right design and small profile end up with the hinge showing slightly (and therefore taking up a little space on the face of the cabinet, which has consequences that we'll see later). These are spring-loaded kitchen cabinet hinges, shown here sitting on top of one of the shelves that will be turned into doors.
The two outer doors have the hinges attached to the edge of the side of the shelving cabinet. The "doors" are just barely tall enough to overlap the opening just slightly, so I was very careful about lining them up to avoid gaps. Once the two outer doors were attached, I was able to evaluate the constraints on the middle door. The doors themselves ended up being completely flush with each other with no space for a side hinge on the middle door. So my options were a top hinge or a bottom hinge. The bottom hinge would have been less visible and slightly more accessible, but it would create the potential for someone to lean on the open door and splinter the wood. (Yes, my project risk assessments assume that my friends will be clumsy and clueless.) So I went with the upper hinge.
The design of the hinge means that when the middle door is opened all the way, the door holds in place, so the convenience aspect turns out ok, it's just the visibility in an odd location that's non-optimal.
So once the varnishing of the legs and lower shelf is done, I'll have a completed cabinet of this style:
One other part of the project is to add a removable upper shelf unit, to make the whole thing look more like this:
I have plans for how I'm going to do it, but it involves more carpentry than I thought I could get done this weekend (since I also have some tent canvas repairs to do, and I need to make packing lists and figure out which cookbooks to take). The other part is to paint the main side panels and doors with a trompe l'oeil design imitating wood carving. I was thinking originally of doing some fancy gothic tracery, along these lines:
But the more I think about it, the more I'm leaning towards a simple linen-fold design repeating on each panel, more like this:
What I'm thinking of is something of a pen-and-ink drawing effect, using fine parallel lines for the shading. I have an acrylic-paint "pen" to experiment with (and one extra door to use for practice), but I don't want to mess it up by being in a hurry.
Oh, and it's really really hot this weekend, and I'm trying to focus on achievable goals.
