Double Dresser (2004)
This is the first of in a series of bedroom furniture for our future daughter. I started with the double dresser since it was the piece we needed most to store the already-burgeoning wardrobe we've been given as gifts. The other pieces in the set will be two bedside tables, a framed mirror, and eventually a bed - all in the same design theme/style.
This project is based on plans from Wood Magazine. I've heavily modified the construction and materials of their piece while maintaining the same style. I chose soft maple for all the "show" surfaces (top, fronts, sides, legs, etc), soft wormy maple for the drawer secondary wood (5/4 stock resawn to 1/2" final thickness), and baltic birch plywood for the drawer web frames. The drawers are dovetailed at all corners and the fronts are raised. I spent a lot of time fine tuning the drawer reveals so that they were even on all sides of every drawer, and I included ball bearing drawer slides per the request of LOML (as shown below below).
The finish is 4 or 5 coats of sprayed water based polyurethane. We chose water poly to keep the soft maple as "white" as possible, and the final topcoat was satin to provide a pleasing but not overpowering sheen. Sanding between each coat and a final polish of the topcoat provided a glass-smooth surface that's very pleasing to touch.
We took a long time to decide on the drawer pulls. In the end we chose a pull that would be attractive to a young girl, but we made sure we chose hardware with standard screw spacing so that she could change the pulls to something more "grown-up" as she grows up.
We're very happy with this piece. The style is simple but not plain, the finish is natural and will not overpower the room decor, and its flexible enough to grow up with our daughter. Hopefully she likes it as much as we do.
© Copyright 2006 Chris Billman