Cherry Double Dresser (2006)
Since I made our first daughter a bedroom full of furniture we thought it was only fair to do the same for daughter #2. So here is the first of several pieces for the new nursery - a double dresser in cherry:
This project is based on plans from Woodsmith Magazine, although I modified the construction and materials of their piece. I chose cherry 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 applied. I spent a lot of time fine tuning the drawer reveals so that they were even on all sides of every drawer, and I incorporated metal drawer slides per the request of LOML (as shown below below).
The finish is a padded spit coat of blonde shellac for blotch control, 3 brushed coats of Waterlox Sealer/Finish, and a wiped-on custom-mixed top coat of 45% Waterlox S/F and 45% Waterlox Satin and 10% mineral spirits. I did several test boards to choose this finish, and it won out over many shellac, varnish, and lacquer products. The finished color is nice and "natural", and we're looking forward to watching the cherry slowly darken over time as out daughter matures along with it.
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 I also made a set of matching turned cherry knobs so that she could change the pulls to something more "grown-up" as she grows up. I'm not sure I like these all that much but SWMBO really loves them on this piece. We'll use similar pulls on the other bedroom pieces yet to come.
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