Dining room remodel 2008-?
Last updated 2/19/09

A few years ago, we decided that the dining room needed to be remodeled.  We've filled it with random bits of furniture that we've collected from here and there, so nothing matches.  The ceiling needs painting due to poor crack filling by the previous homeowners, which has caused the paint to fail here and there.  More to the point though, we want it to be an Arts & Crafts XANADU.  Paneled walls, a proper A&C chandelier, and A&C furniture.  Such a project can't be done overnight...it will take a long time and a lot of effort to achieve our goals.

The first thing I did was to start replacing furniture.  Last winter, I built a Roycroft magazine stand out of black walnut, which you can see here.  Walnut was chosen because our one piece of good dining room furniture, a ~1930s Art Deco sideboard, is made of walnut.

My current project is to build a window bench/built-in storage cabinet under our bay windows.  The idea is to make it a piece of built-in furniture, so the bits you see will be made of gumwood (like our trim) and stained to make it look like it's been there since the house was new.  The trick is that since the house is old and everything is out of square, it has to be built in place and there will be a LOT of tweaking to make the connections between the "old" and "new" seamless. This makes this project much more difficult than a piece of stand alone furniture would be.

First, I built the carcass for the cabinet:

Pic of carcass

The carcass is made of white pine...didn't feel like hunting down decent plywood to make it.  There will be adjustable shelves in it when it's done.  Next was the gumwood face frame for it, but I don't have a picture of it yet.  I also made the top for it, but again, I have no picture yet.

But I do have pictures of the doors for it:



Here's are the pieces for one of the panel-and-frame doors, to show how they're made.  The panels fit into grooves cut into the rails (horizontal) and stiles (vertical) of the frame.  There's a center stile in the middle to help strengthen the door and add some visual appeal.  The rails fit into the stiles using mortise-and-tenon joinery (square tab on rail fits into square hole on stile), all cut by hand.  The little white and clear strips are rubbery spacers that will keep the panels from rattling in the frame no matter how much they shrink or expand.

Here's a pic of the assembled door (the extra lengths on the stiles are called "horns", and get cut off after the door is glued up.  They help prevents the mortises from breaking apart during assembly):



Here's a picture of the cabinet almost completed...the doors have been fitted, and I just need to finish them:



And here's a picture of the completed project.  Didn't turn out too bad...the color pretty close to the original gumwood, and should get closer with age: