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.