The Pastor's Study

This daylight basement serves as the Pastor's office. It originally had a set of twelve mahogany plywood doors that opened to reveal a long damp and poorly finished storage area.

We were able to reuse those plywood doors to build these beautiful self-cased bookshelves. The solid lumber in the face frames and shelf edges is reclaimed lumber from a deconstructed building owned by the same church.

This project is pretty unusual because we used douglas fir and mahogany together. We overcame the differences in grain and color characteristics by using a stain and glaze finish process with conversion varnish.

Overall this project contained over 80% reused material (by weight). Even the glaze was saved from the Hazardous waste stream.

The problem with Melamine

A potential client recently asked me if she could "upgrade" to melamine interiors. Wow. There's power in marketing, and the big cabinet factories and melamine manufacturers seem to have convinced people that their product is better. It's not.

One of the problems with melamine is that it has very little internal structure. It is particle board coated with a very thin layer of plastic. In the picture at the left, you can see how much these lightly loaded shelves have warped. Plywood won't do that. Plywood consists of sheets of veneer that give it superior strength to solid lumber. And how long do you think those shelf support holes will last?

The melamine people will tell you how easy it is to wipe clean. Oh yeah? Ever try to remove the scuff marks left by your canned goods? If you've had melamine interiors, you know how dingy they look after awhile. Clear coated Plywood interiors do wipe clean easily, and scratches and chips can be repaired.

The third problem with melamine is water damage, especially under the sink. If you ever have a leak, and it only takes one, the particle board under the melamine will swell up, cracking and ruining the melamine coating. When that happens, you can either live with the ugly result, you can replace the cabinet, or you can try to repair a product that wasn't meant to be serviced. You probably won't like the result. If the leak goes on unnoticed for a few weeks, mold can start growing and can spread to the paper surface of the wallboard. Mold thrives on pre-digested wood products like particle board and paper. A clearcoated plywood cabinet interior is much less likely to show any damage, and if it does, It can be fixed by the homeowner with sandpaper and a can of spray lacquer.

On a side note, you'll see "green" cabinet makers advertising that they use wheat board. Wheat board is a product that uses wheat chaff as the primary ingredient for the particle board. It smells like a farm, but it's still particle board with a melamine coating. If a product has a severely limited lifespan, is it really green?

So why is Melamine so popular? Simple...Follow the money. Large new home builders try to squeeze out the most profit possible by asking their suppliers to provide products at the lowest possible price. Melamine is less expensive than plywood, and it's already finished so there's less work for the cabinet maker and finishing crew to do. Which means that the cabinet factory can still make a profit. Since the big cabinet shops set the industry standards, most smaller shops have followed, and have been able to provide cheaper cabinets. And when I say cheaper, I mean 5-10% less expensive.

When you need cabinets, you'll want to be informed, and you'll want to consider whether quality and longevity are worth a 5-10% price change.

After: What can we do with this?

So here's what we came up with. Pardon the dust and the blue tape.

If you haven't read the previous blog post, you might want to. It has the before pictures, and it describes the problems and limitations of this particular project.

One unusual feature of this kitchen is the use of wood panels to cover the existing chimneys. On The refrigerator side of the kitchen, the wood panel allowed me to bring the entire side of the kitchen into a single plane. Usually, I look for ways to add some texture, but this kitchen had already had too many different nooks and corners.

The counter top beside the refrigerator is only 12" deep so that I could maximise the drawer space available in the big drawer bank. Those puppies are 28" deep, rather than the 22" that you usually see. The corbeled shelf adds some practicality, and adds a lot to the overall look of the kitchen. To the left of that shelf, there is a small vertical wine rack and an appliance garage.

The wood panel beside the microwave will have a pot rack mounted in the wide space at the top.

The wood is clear finished unselect Alder. The countertop is granite tile, and the backsplash is slate.

Before. What Can we do with this?

Sometimes, you wish you had a little more to work with. This kitchen is in a great foursquare house in a nice neighborhood, but yikes! What to do?

The layout of this kitchen was a mess. Soffits all around, but at inconsistent heights. Two chimneys jutting out into the kitchen. The walls on either side of each chimney were in different planes.

The homeowners were trying to get the house ready to sell, and they wanted to do it quickly. No time or budget for soffit removal or knocking down the service chimney. Budget wise, knew they needed custom cabinets because the space was so chopped up.

Next post: I think you'll be amazed at the solution.

Home Show

We're doing the home show this year! It's at the Oregon Convention Center for hours and a $2 off coupon, follow this link

We're sharing booth space with Josh Farrand of Eight Inch Nails Construction, and Clint Howes of Revive Construction. We hope you'll come by and say hi.

We have a few items displayed at the booth. The top picture is of the big old-timey hutch with the wine storage in the columns, colored glass and inset flush doors and drawers. This piece is made almost entirely of reclaimed fir lumber.

The second picture is of a dark stained alder cabinet with a clear finished alder top.

The third picture shows Josh's eyebrow dormer. Josh took a class from an East Coast craftsman to learn how to build them, and we've received a lot of positive feedback about it at the show. You can also see Clint's reclaimed fir garden bench which is being raffled off. Second prize is a bird house.

Between the three of us, we can build almost anything. No visitor to our booth has stumped us yet.

An Engineering Marvel

Okay, okay, this desk doesn't include any structural breakthroughs, but it is big, and it is for an engineer.

Marc wanted to be able to lay out plans without completely obscuring his desk. I think we've accomplished that goal. This puppy is 120" long and 66" deep.

We hashed through several ideas of how to treat the corners before arriving at the curved edge on the top and the angled ends on the modesty panel.

For those of you keeping score, the wood is knotty alder with a custom matched stain. The top material is plastic laminate by Wilsonart "Luna Night".

The entertainment center/bookcase in the top picture is also from Saratoga Woodworks, as is the window seat barely visible toward the right of the picture.

Lofty goals: How to get there

A Client recently came in with a picture of a space saving stairway. Apparently this is a relatively common design in Great Britain.

He asked me if it was something I could do. I said yes because I love the problem solving involved in trying new things. This project wasn't too difficult once we settled on an angle. The material is 1.25" thick knotty pine, and the treads are dadoed into the carriages.

The concept of the alternating treads is pretty interesting. Since your right and left legs would naturally fall on alternating steps, this staircase has an effective rise/run of 9.25"/9.5". I'm curious to see how well this works once it's installed.


This client had been using a fiberglass ladder to access his sleeping loft and he wanted something that didn't take up much room, but looked "cool". I'd say we accomplished that goal.

All the Right Angles

Actually right angles are easy. It's the other ones that cause woodworkers to scratch their heads. But I like to design with angles for several reasons:

First, you can make better use of space. The bookcase in the top picture was designed to fit along a wall, but there was a window only 8" from the wall. The angle allowed me extemd the bookcase all the way across that wall without blocking the window. More room for books, more light streaming into the room, and a happy customer.

Second, ngles can also help to make a space more functional. The second picture shows an angled drawer above a cabinet with cookie sheet dividers. The stove is barely visible to the right. We were working around a chimney that jutted into the kitchen, and this angle enabled us to install the stove with and still have usable counter space and a full size bank of drawers.



Third, angles can serve to soften a corner. The last picture shows a cabinet with a reclaimed wood top and another angled drawer. This angle allowed us to avoid having a sharp angle jutting out into the kitchen. It has visual appeal while it prevents bruises.

The final reason I like angles is that it helps me to keep trigonometry fresh in my mind. Someday, my little boy is going to ask me to help him figure out an angle in a right triangle where the opposite side is 14" and the adjacent side is 24". And I'll be able to say something more meaningful than "thats's such acute angle."

In the Process Part V: Not done, but it's got wine storage.

It's good that this project is taking some time--that means that I have some more pressing work to attend to.

My favorite feature on the hutch are the columns. They have a slight taper (one inch over almost 7 feet), and they open up to reveal a broom closet on the left, and wine storage on the right.

The most technically difficult parts are finished. I have yet to complete the doors, some mouldings, and the finish.

This hutch is pretty big. It's nearly 8 feet tall, and five feet wide. That means that it needed to be constructed in such a way that it could be easily disassembled for transport. When fully assembled, it is difficult to guess where it comes apart.

When I finally complete this project, it is likely to end up in the showroom at Lumen Essence Lighting on the North Park Blocks. If you have any interest in old house lighting, you owe it to yourself to visit Larry at this amazing shop.

In the Process part IV, It's not that clear

Using reclaimed material requires some decisions that you don't encounter when using new materials.

Most of the fir that I'm using in this project is far superior to the fir that I can buy new from the lumberyard. This stuff was clearly cut from old growth. The vertical grain in some of these boards is so tight that you would have to use a magnifying glass to count the growth rings. It's beautiful stuff, but it's also riddled with nail holes and their associated stains.

Normally, I cut out the defects that will show in the face of the project, but if I did that with the reclaimed, there would be a huge amount of waste. And waste is at odds with the concept of reuse that caused me to get interested in working with reclaimed material in the first place. That's why you see so much "character" in these pictures.

Here's where I am on the project:

The drawers are done. They ride on center mounted waxed wooden guides--just like they might have if this were built in 1925.

I still need to glue the doors together, and do the joinery associated with the curved detail.

The columns are done--on the outside, but I still need to figure out exactly how they will be attached to the cabinet, and I need to finish their special touches. the column on the left will be a broom closet. The one on the right will be wine storage.

Finally, I'll attack the mouldings. I'm planning on doing a built up crown mould that totals 7" in height and the base mould will be 9" tall.

In the Process III: The Pressure of the Clamps

The hutch building continues.

One of the marks of good craftsmanship is avoiding the use of visible fasteners. There are several ways to accomplish this goal. You can simply putty a nail hole, or you can use decorative or grain matched plugs to cover screws. I generally choose to use glue and lots of clamps.

Glued joints are amazingly strong. When done properly, the lumber will come apart before the glue joint. I do like to use mechanical fasters to complement the glue on moving parts like doors and drawers, but those don't need to show on the face of the cabinet.

Since my last post, I've built the upper cabinet box, attached the face frames to the boxes, and attached the bead mould to the curved part of the face frame. I also made a top and made the back using a joint called a half-lap.

Next up: Building the doors and drawers.

In the Process Part II

I'm making good progress on the hutch.

In the old days, the cabinet maker would have been working at the house, not at a cabinet shop. He'd nail things to the wall and build from there. That's why they called them built ins. They didn't have plywood so everything was built with sticks.

My project has the additional challenge of needing to be strong enough to move around. I'm doing that by building the lower part using a series of dadoes and tenons. This is the way some old dressers were built. Everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, and it can stand on its own even before I glue everything together.

The darker colored wood is recycled poplar--it was once a booth at The Old Spaghetti Factory. The lighter wood is reclaimed fir. It was once framing lumber in the old North Baptist Church in North Portland.

The bottom two pictures show some design details. I'm using a bead mould around all of the door and drawer openings. At this point, nothing is sanded, and only the face frames are glued together. The bottom picture shows how I arrived at the curves. The vertical pencil lines helped me to make sure that the curve was symmetrical. I still need to apply bead mould to that curves. That corner miter will be tricky, and the vertical section is a pretty tight bend, but I've got a strategy that has worked for me in the past.

Next step is building the cabinet box for the upper portion.

In the Process

I thought it might be fun to do a series on something that I'm building as I'm building it.

I collect pictures of built-in hutches from real estate ads...they help me with inspiration, and they help me to get the proportions and details right. Those old-timers built neat stuff, and I'm trying to learn from them.

So here's the project. I'm building the hutch in the picture using the reclaimed fir lumber pictured at the left. The hutch is white, but I'm building it to be stained. I'm going to use traditional construction methods, that is, I'm not using plywood, except in the drawer bottoms where solid lumber is completely impractical.

The second picture of lumber is the "after" picture. It's the same lumber after it's been metal detected and run through the planer.

I'll show some of the construction techniques as I go along. The final product will be for sale. I hope it takes me a long time to finish, because I hope I'm interrupted with paying jobs in the meantime.

Teacher! I want a different desk!

Jeff Metke of Metke Remodeling called me to ask me if I could build a desk that wasn't just ordinary. He had a very rough pencil sketch of the end of this desk, for a design concept, and a coffee table of unknown origin that provided the inspiration for the texture and two tone color scheme.

There were several design challenges to address before building the desk.

First, There was an unusually long cantilever that had to be considered. The legs had to be able to sustain the weight of the desk itself and anybody that might happen to sit on it. This problem was solved by weighting the legs and using a very heavy grade of plywood in the privacy panel.

Second, the client wanted the handcarved texture. Since the endgrain of lumber doesn't carve well, all surfaces of the legs needed to be flat grain. This meant bending the lumber to fit the curves and mitering the joint between the curve and the flat portion. It took some headscratching, but the result was worth it. I'm pretty proud of the result.

Third, the office is up the stairs, first door on the right. The desk had to be designed to come apart and be reconstructed easily. No problem. The desk disassembles into 7 pieces in a matter of minutes.

This desk is a great example of the design, problem solving, and woodworking abilities we have at Saratoga Woodworks.