Day Eight-thirty-four: more fun with furniture

So if you've been playing the home version of this renovation odyssey then you know we once thought about putting a pantry in our kitchen. If you've forgotten, then maybe this trip into the Wayback Machine will help. With no room in the kitchen for the pantry we turned that piece into an armoire for the bedroom.

All fine and dandy, right? If you thought so then you have not been paying close enough attention because now this piece does not fit the decor of the studio that it is in (yes, it made the trek to the studio when we rearranged the furniture in several rooms recently). What to do? Well, sand off or rough up the painted parts of the frame and repaint. But the doors were a bit trickier. From experience we knew that if we tried to sand them clean then we'd lose much of the detail and basically mangling them, so we opted to make some new ones. Another benefit of this plan was that we could match better with the other furniture in the room that we've been working on.

We started with some simple 1x3 boards of poplar because it's harder than pine but a lot easier to work with than oak. We cut the lengths for the two doors and routered out a groove to hold the inset panel. These are the short pieces that go lengthwise across the top and bottom of the doors. The purpose of the fifth piece (atop the stack on the right) will become clear in a second but note that it has grooves on both sides.

Here are the long pieces before they found their groove.

We used our new clamp/guides to keep the router on track because without sufficient guidance it has a tendency to want to wander and that just wouldn't do.

Next we had to do some precision drilling for the dowel rods that we planned to use to connect the pieces of the frame. This was pretty exacting work and we can't claim to have gotten everything right, so there might be some sanding that we need to do to the frame to make it all even.

Once attached the back of the door looked like this before panel...

and after.

The back doesn't do it justice, so here's the real thing, not yet fully assembled and certainly not painted/stained. You can see that we adopted the Mission style for the door that we installed in the kitchen.

As a reminder, here's what the old door looked like.

Finally, we decided to change the look of the bigger, lower door by breaking it into two panels. We hope this will make the whole unit look more integrated and reduce some of the surface area. Here's where we needed the cross piece that had two grooves, one for the upper and lower panels of the door. Without panels...

and with (albeit from the back).

Day Eight-twenty-five: hamper finis!

Phew. At last we can keep our laundry nice and tidy. The final product is below, scroll down if further if you want to see the final stages.

The first we had to do was finish putting clear stain on all the pieces. Here are the cross beams, legs and bottom. These had to catch up to the stiles which had been done and waiting patiently.

Then we had to try assembling the sides for real. With glue. No turning back now. We laid out all the pieces...

...and did the deed. The only wrinkle was that the dowel pieces were all a tad long.

So we ended up with a pile of nubs cut off of each one.

With all the sides together and attached to the legs and bottom, the final step was to install the hinges. We opted for some upper-end ones from Rockler because, like a laptop hinge, they can stay open at any angle. Given that you often make deposits and withdrawals from a hamper with only one hand we thought it would be handy if the lid would cooperate.

We created a little template for the part of the hinge that overhangs.

This was necessary because the hinge is only .75 inches deep but the cross beam is 1 inch. So we had to carve out a little notch for the hinge to fit.

Attach screws to the hamper and lid and you're done!

So how'd we do compared with our original design? Aside from the little handle, which we decided against because it was too small for the lid, we kept pretty true to our word.