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.

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

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.