Medicine Cabinet for a Bathroom

On the second floor of our house, there is a small half-bathroom. It had long been in need of being refurbished, and now that we had re-arranged things, and were using the adjoining room as our master bedroom, the time had come. I went for a simple re-design. We had some left over solid oak flooring from our kitchen remodel, and that fit the space nicely. I used some simple pine beadboard millwork for a wainscot, finished with amber shellac. I had to make a soffit to cover the plumbing stack. I did have to move some electrical around, and installed a three light sconce. I even got fancy and installed an old-timey push button light switch. Followed with a coat of paint, it all came together nicely. But the piece de resistance, and an excuse to get woodworking involved, was a medicine cabinet.

The medicine cabinet was going to be inset into the wall (as opposed to surface mounted), and needed a nice, large mirror, and room for several shelves. For the design, I put together elements from several sources, and laid out the resulting concept in Sketchup.

For materials, I went with quarter sawn white oak, as I was going for a classic craftsman look on this one. Although the wainscot was pine, I felt the oak of the cabinet would tie in to the oak flooring. Plus, I had the stock on hand, and I always like being able to use up "scraps" for smaller projects whenever possible.

The cabinet is basically three parts: the cabinet body box, the decorative face frame, and a door. Because the cabinet was inset into the wall, and back side would not be seen, so I used pocket screws for much of the joinery on the frame and body. The door, having to be strong (as it had to hold a large mirror, and only supported by the hinges) and seen from both sides, used mortise and tenon joints. I also drilled holes for shelf pins before assembly.

Before getting to the door, I did a test fit on the case body and face frame assembly in the bathroom wall. Luckily, the wall wasn't too irregular, and the frame was going to sit nicely against the wall, with just a little bit of oddness on one corner. But it wasn't going to be very visible, and was hidden for the most part by the sconce.

Back in the shop, I put the door together. The tenons of the door frame were secured with through pegs. I didn't do the drawbore technique here, as the glue and simple straight through pegging seemed to be enough. I then installed the hinge hardware, and was ready for the finish.

For the finish, I went with my go to process of water based dark mission brown dye, followed by several coats of shellac, this time a darker garnet that I mixed from flakes. I applied about 4 coats, sanding lightly in between, then finished it off with a coat of dark paste wax, applied with 0000 steel wool, then buffed off. This finish process on quarter sawn white oak never fails to look gorgeous to me. After that, I cut the glass for the mirror, fit it into the door opening, and secured it with stops tacked in with brads.

I also made several 1/4" thick oak shelves. Installation went well, thanks the the earlier test fit, and it was attached to the wall studs with a few screws through the case. The final bit of hardware to fit was the small surface mounted latch. Although surface mounted, I had to do some mortising to fit it properly, as the design features a small 1/8" set back/reveal for the door relative to the frame. This makes a nice shadow line in the piece, but it meant that either the latch body had to be bumped out, resting on some sort of little platform piece, or the catch part had to be recessed. I chose to recess the catch as the lesser of two evils.

(Please pardon the lousy lighting in some of these interior shots: it's hard get good light in a 5' x 8' windowless bathroom with a slanted ceiling.) Once in place, we were pretty pleased with the result. The cabinet looked good, and did tie into the other elements of the room quite well. You might notice that I didn't install a backer board, to back up the mirror, on the inside of the door. Honestly, I never thought about it during the build, and not until much later when I was watching some other woodworking video with a mirror in a door, and they put a backer on, did it occur to me that might be a good idea. I'll see if that way it is now bothers me or not. So far: not.

One thing my wife and I discovered after using this setup for a few months was that we had to keep open and closing the door 10,000 times in the course of doing anything up there: shaving, brushing teeth, etc. Mainly because there is not one horizontal surface to place anything on: the sink is just a small pedestal, and... well, that's it. So, I took a little more shop time, and made a small white oak shelf that sits between the sink and the medicine cabinet. It works perfectly, and solved the horizontal space problem nicely.

This was a nice home improvement-meets-furniture project, that both solved a problem and made our home a little bit nicer. Thanks for reading.

Wardrobe, Part 5

Following the progress from Wardrobe, Part 4, I now turned my attention to the drawers. After sizing them and fitting the fronts, I proceeded to make the boxes, using birch plywood and poplar for the bottoms and sides, respectively. As these drawers hang from runners attached to the sides, the original piece uses sliding dovetails to join the fronts to the drawer boxes. In addition, those dovetails need to be stopped at that the top, so they won't show from above. This makes for a very machine-centric joint. I generally dislike using the router: its noisy and annoying to use. But, it is sometimes the best tool for the job, and for this piece, is is. This is a reproduction, after all, and that's how it was done then too.

I did find when routing the grooves that the dovetail bit would tend to blow out one of the sides of the cut, even after backing (or in this case, fronting) the workpiece with a scrap. As its a dovetail bit, there's no sneaking up on it, or doing a shallow cut first, like a straight cut would allow. It's the whole thing or nothing. That meant I had to lay out the cuts with a bevel gauge, and do a relief saw cut to sever the fibers on the blowout prone side first. That worked well, and I had only a couple of blow-outs to glue back with CA glue. Those looked fine after sanding and finishing.

I then had to do another stopped groove between the stopped dovetails, to make the groove that holds the drawer bottom in place.

With all those pieces ready, and the sides & backs cut, I was able to do the dry assembly. I decided to leave the sides & bottom of the drawers unfinished. I felt that if I really wanted to, it would be easy enough to go back and apply some clear shellac later. After the dry assembly, I cut the gentle arches that serve as the openings for the hand pulls. Then it was finishing time again (grain raising, water based dye, amber shellac) on the fronts. If you're keeping score, this is the third time in the project I've had to switch gears from joinery & case work to finishing.

The grooves for the runners were cut into the drawer aides with a router, with the drawers clamped to the bench (sorry, no photos of that). Then I made and attached the runners, using unfinished white oak. I tired to be very precise on getting the fit right so the drawers would slide well, the fronts would have the right reveals, and they wouldn't bind. I was generally pleased with the results, but felt I should have done better. They do get a little left-to-right shifty as they're near the end of their extension, but I guess that's to be expected.

Finally, it was time to fit the doors. They'd been assembled, oversized, with finished center panels, and sitting around the shop for months now, and at last they could be fit to the openings, and finished. I found it hard to work on mortising the lower of the two pairs of hinges, as I had to work near the floor with the huge case on the dolly, but I got it done. It's just awkward to do that chiseling and router plane work crouched down near the floor, and at 90°. There was a bit of attaching-and-removing to be done when trying to get the reveal on the doors correct. One mistake that game back to bite me was that there was a slight bit of twist introduced to this large, heavy case as it sat on the maybe-not-perfectly-level dolly and my not-perfectly-even shop floor. After I brought the thing into the house, placed it on a differently out-of-level floor, the case had a bit of twist it, and in a different direction than when it was in the shop. That twist was telegraphed directly to all the careful fitting I'd done on these large, tall doors. It might have made more sense to have found a very, very flat floor to place it on, then fit things, then shimmed under the feet as needed when it was in its final location. Luckily, nowhere were the doors more than 1/16" out, and after I placed some shims under the feet, it worked fine. But its a good lesson for next time.

I also fit the pulls, and the ball catches for the top and bottom of each door to help hold them closed. The ball catch part was not in the original plans, and there was no mention or guidance on how to hold the doors closed. I thought of several solutions, but top and bottom ball catches seemed like the most subtle and elegant solution.

And, then back to finishing, again (that's four times!), getting the rails and stiles of the doors done. And then... wow, it was all built! I went over all the finish with any shellac touch ups that were needed, just using a shellac rag-ball. When dry, I went over the whole piece, inside and out, with dark paste wax, applied with 0000 steel wool, then buffed out with cotton rags.

Carrying the piece into our first floor bedroom was a lot work, as even with the doors and drawers removed, it was heavy. I can only imagine how much more heavy it would have been if I'd used full depth drawer dividers. When it was finally in place, I could at last step back, and take it in. It really works for the room, and is a huge improvement over the open, metal shelf system it replaced. As mentioned before, the legs needed a little shimming both to get it level to the eye, and to make sure the doors fit as intended.

Now that is is done, a full confession: this took about one year from start to finish. There were many interruptions along the way, many of those were other projects (that I'll be posting about soon!), some were just the normal flow of other things in my life. The back-and-forth between doing joinery, then switching to doing finishing, was tedious, and I think slowed things down a lot. While I'm very pleased with the look of the solid panels, that added quite a lot of time to this build, and was probably the main reason it took so long to complete. The size was a factor too: there's a lot of lumber in this piece! Also, having to work on other projects while juggling around the various parts and piece of this for a year was annoying. I really do like to work on one thing at a time, and get it done, out of the way, and start something new with a clean and open shop. So, hopefully, I'll avoid this type of situation again. 

But I'm proud of this piece: its one of the biggest I've ever attempted, and its just plain beautiful. I love having this in my house. Seeing it in place, along with the other pieces I've built, fills me with a certain serenity and generates genuine feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment. There's noting like making a beautiful and useful object that I hopefully will be able to enjoy to the end of my days. I guess that's why I do it.

Thank you for following along.

Wardrobe, Part 4

When I finally was able to return to the wardrobe build, it was time to square off the glued up panels for the sides & back, and cut the bottom and top to size as well. On the side panels, I also cut the arch that forms the feet of the cabinet. But before I could assemble it, I had to go back to finishing it again. If you recall, the panels were finished, but the rails and stiles were not. Instead of doing assembly first, then finishing them in place, it seemed easier to finish them as separate pieces now.

That meant taping off the panels, and then applying the dye and shellac to the rails and stiles, also avoiding the glue surfaces. Yup, you can it hear it in my (typing) voice - that was tedious. But again, the result was great, and FINALLY, assembly could proceed.

The assembly finally revealed the true size of this thing - big. It took quite a few clamps. The bottom and top were attached using screws to cleats, and the arched stretchers in the front and back were attached with pocket screws.

Here's the result, with the center divider set in place and braced temporarily.

The assembly was placed on a wheeled dolly so I could scoot it around my shop as needed, and this proved really handy. 

I could now contemplate the remaining build: drawer dividers, the doors, hardware, and the sliding clothes hanger. One thing left out at me when looking at the drawer dividers: this is going to heavy as well as big. The plans show the six drawer dividers as being made of solid stock, from the front to the back for the drawer side. That's about six more pieces of 22"22" 3/4" oak, in addition to the solid oak center divider. As the drawers are going to slide on side runners, solid full depth dividers seemed like overkill. So I re-designed them to be just 4" deep dividers. This made a lot more sense to me. The drawer dividers were attached to the side with pocket screws.

I took this moment to make the sliding clothes hanger for the right side. This was a lot of fun, for some reason.

Next up: drawers, doors, home stretch. 

Wardrobe, Part 3

Resuming this build series from Part 2, I'd just finished dry filling the side & back panels. As I was fitting the back panel, the reality of its size became apparent... this was going to be a pretty big build...

Thankfully, the fit went well. One of the things you might notice in the above photos is a little bit of discoloration on the stiles. That is just the tannins in the oak reacting to the environment. It is a "flaw" unless I was doing some very dark coloration to the wood. But my planed finish was a sort of medium, and the discoloration would be visible. But I decided to work with it anyway, and even with some other "less than perfect" material, because I wanted to approach this from a practical "we need a wardrobe" perspective, rather than a "this should be in a gallery or museum" standard. I want to embrace that approach more in my work - making good furniture with great craftsmanship, but not getting obsessive about getting a glass finish on the underside the feet. Any examination of fantastic pieces in museums, historic homes, etc, will show you that is the approach craftsmen of yore took - the backs of cases, the underside of drawers are usually raw and unfinished. Our modern "every single unseen surface should be gallery perfect" approach is over the top, and I hope to remain practical in that light.

To that end, I put the slightly "off" pieces and parts in places that would rarely, if ever be seen, and have no effect on the functionality of the piece. Here's an example of the pieces I used for the bottom panel; there was a nail removal chunk (done by the sawyers) missing from the middle of the glued up panel. Instead of ditching the material, I did a patch repair, and that area is on the underside of the bottom of the wardrobe. Good luck lifting up this huge, fully loaded wardrobe and seeing that.

Next, I did more panels, this time the two large doors. The same as the sides and back. I saved the prettiest pieces and panels for the doors - the most visible part of the piece.

With all the panels dry fit, it was time to get into the PITA part of doing solid panels vs plywood panels (discussed in Part 1) - finishing the panels before assembly (as well as the inner edges of the frames). I got all the parts labeled, knocked apart, and ready to go.

twelve panels

a zillion rails & stiles

The finishing process was some light shade of brown water based dye, followed by several coats of amber shellac. I had to come up with a way to store the twelve panels as they dried, as well as the zillion rails and stiles. The rails and stiles just ended up on my "assembly table" (aka, my table saw + outfeed table), and the panels ended up in this dowels + 2x4 rack I improvised. The rack worked well, as I shellacked one face at a time, left it it dry, then did the other face.

dowels and 2x4 drying rack

inner edges of the rails & stiles being finished

This took a while to do, and with some real life interruptions, longer than I liked. But after the finishing was done, glue up & assembly went fine. And that's how the wardrobe stayed, for a long time, as other projects cut in line ahead of it. More in part 4...

wardrobe pieces (doors, sides, back, top, bottom, and inner divider) taking up shop space - I ended up stumbling over them and moving them back and forth, working around them, for the next several months. 

Resuming Shortly

It's been a few months since the blog was updated. In that time, I've been woodworking a lot, with many completed projects, some new tools and new techniques to report on. Stay tunes, and I'll start getting those posted.