OK, here it is: the finalized design from my nightstand project.
I’ve made a few changes to the overall look:
- I decided against using walnut, and switched to cherry instead. My four-year-old daughter has a peanut allergy, so I’m concerned about walnut dust getting into the house. I don’t know if it would affect her or not, but I don’t really want to find out the hard way. So, my house is a walnut-free zone. I’ve worked with cherry before without any issues.
- I nixed the inlay. I was never entirely happy with any of the inlay options that I came up with. As I started experimenting with metal in the design, the piece started to look too contemporary. I think the lines and curves of the design stand on their own. Sometimes less is more, and I think that is true in this case.
- I got rid of the metal hardware. I liked the look of it against the walnut… but on cherry, not so much. I surfed around the internet a bit for some inspiration, and I found a line of furniture on Thomas Moser’s website that uses ebonized pulls which look really nice against the cherry drawer faces. I think it will be a cool little side project to try hand carving and ebonizing something similar for my project. I’ve never done anything like that before, so it should be fun to learn.
- Finally, I switched to a three drawer configuration. The two drawers were a bit too deep. We’d end up piling things on top of each other in the drawers, which would quickly become an unmanageable mess. The three drawers are graduated; the top, middle, and bottom drawer faces are 5″, 6″, and 7″ wide respectively.
I’ve worked out on paper the design for the internal runners and guides that will support the drawers, but I have not drawn that up in Sketchup. If you’re interested in seeing that, drop me a line either via a comment or the contact page and let me know. If I get a large enough response, I’ll draw it up in Sketchup and post the pictures.
So there you have it, the final nightstand design. I plan to build two of these simultaneously. Over the next day or so I’m going to write out a cutlist and calculate how much wood I need. Hopefully, I can make a lumber run sometime in the next week or so and then we can move on to the construction phase.
To view the entire Nightstand Project series, please visit my project page.
Looks great – will definitely be watching this with interest! What will you do with the others – sell or give away?
Looks good Dave. I can’t wait to get the shop functional and have time to do other things than construction and land development. God, counting the remodel of the house that got us here, I’ve been at it for almost eleven years.(a long time to get to a dream). I’d been here sooner if I hadn’t had to work a regular job in the meantime. Such is life.
I would love to see the interior parts sketched out, also. One of these days I may learn to use a CAD type program. Except for designing the house, I’ve usually just hand sketched. It serves my purposes. Plus I like the process of pencil to paper.
I’m looking forward seeing your process as you move thru the construction of your nightstand.
[...] July 24, 2008 by Dave I’m planning on cutting some (or all, if time permits) joinery this weekend, so let me give you a quick preview of my plan. The vast majority of the carcass joinery is good old mortise-and-tenon. The picture below shows how I plan to lay out the joints. In this picture, you are looking down at a corner of the carcass. You can see the leg, a front rail, and a side rail depicted. Sorry for the poor quality of the picture; I had to sketch this out quickly on graph paper because I didn’t have time to model everything in Sketchup. If you need a frame of reference, you can see the final nightstand design here. [...]
I love how you did the legs, I have been having a hard time figuring out that same splayed? curve that I have in my mind