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Sherri's Scrapbooking Desk (2008)

This desk is my wife's Christmas present, and I finished it on Nov 3, 2008. Unfortunately it was supposed to be her Christmas present for 2007. Better late than never, right??

This piece has been quite a long time in the making. Not that it was incredibly difficult (although it had it's challenges), it's just that there is a lot to build here and I've been getting very few hours in the shop thanks to lots of other higher priority commitments. I've been taking subtle jabs that it's long overdue from my wife and mother in law all this year, so I'm incredibly happy to get this thing out of the shop and into her "office".

The desktop is cherry and the backing on the hutch is cherry ply. The drawer boxes are lower grade cherry (with sapwood or pitch pockets or knots) that kept me from using it in show locations. The rest of the piece is soft maple and baltic birch plywood. The finish on the cherry is my favorite tried and true schedule for that wood - a washcoat of 1# shellac for blotch control, 2 or 3 brushed coats of Waterlox original sealer/finish, and a topcoat of 50% Waterlox original and 50% Waterlox satin. The green areas are maple with two sprayed coats of green milk paint, two sprayed coats of waterborne gloss Polycrylic, and one sprayed coat of satin Polycrylic. The milk paint was quite a challenge (many bad words were said) but it turned out nicely in the end.

I designed this project myselft using Sketchup as an aid to visualize dimensions/proportions and to help generate a cutlist. Check out an early rendering here - pretty close, right? We were able to fit it into a prescribed tight space but maximize the storage and working surfaces. There are two pullout shelves in the tower units as shown below.

The drawers are hand 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 full extension drawer slides per the request of LOML (as shown below below).

We're very happy with this piece. I'm proud of the way it turned out (although I'd tweak a few design features if I were to do it over), and Sherri is very happy with its appearance and functionality. Hopefully it will serve her ably for many years to come.

By the way, see if you agree with our last minute design decision. I actually built two crown molding assemblies for the top of the hutch. I wasn't sure if a cherry crown or a matching green crown would look better. We actually tried both on the finished piece and chose the green crown. Check out these pictures of the rejected cherry crown and let us know if you'd make the same choice or not: overall piece, hutch assembly.