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Coming into town uninvited I get the day off from work today! Yippee!

The best part is that late last night it took a slight turn to the north before making landfall, which means we're getting lots of rain but not much wind from it. So we're just hanging out enjoying the heavy rain and not going to work. So far we haven't had much wind but it is supposed to pick up in our part of town around 1pm this afternoon and get into the 30mph range. Less than we saw from the glancing blow from Rita a couple summers ago.

I'll be spending the day working on this:

With any luck we'll have some flooding in the low intersections around our neighborhood and have to stay home again tomorrow ;-)

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Final pictures of empire high chest
Entered: 2008-07-10
Edited: 2008-07-10
Type: woodworking

We actually finished this up in May but I forgot to post pictures because a few days later we went back up to Anchorage for a week. Just got distracted.

Anyway here's how it came out:

Forgive the picture quality it's hard enough to take photos of something so damn shiny under the best of circumstances and my camera is getting a bit tired.

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Empire High Chest
Entered: 2008-05-08
Edited: 2008-05-08
Type: woodworking

I have a few more pictures of the chest of drawers we're restoring:

The big top drawer has had the finish repaired and polished, the others are all still in progress. The lighting in the shop sucks for pictures so it's hard to see but the surface of the drawer has a mirror polish, you can literally see your reflection when you walk up to it now. We're nearly done with the small drawers and the other large ones will take some more time they've only been cleaned.

We found the key!

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American Empire High Chest (1850ish)
Entered: 2008-04-23
Edited: 2008-04-23
Type: woodworking

A few weeks ago our friend Joe asked me if I could help him pick out some furniture for his new apartment, he knows I woodwork for fun and figured I could help him not get ripped off. I told him that IMO the best deals on quality furniture were antiques from the '30s and '40s mainly, because they are typically very well made, have had 70 years for any problems to show up and aren't usually collectible and so are affordable. So last weekend Becca and I took Joe antiquing (or mantiquing as we decided to call it) to help him find some bedroom furniture.
While we were out there Becca and I continued our long running search for a nice dresser.

Joe made out very well and found a terrific matching set of mahogany bedroom furniture - a good sized dresser with mirror and a pair of matching nightstands - made in the '40s probably post war.

Here's our chest. The dealer didn't have much information just that it was purchased in Pennsylvania and (incorrectly) stated that it was built in the 1870s. It's most likely a pre-Civil War piece from around 1840-50 according to several people on the woodnet.net woodworking forums I post at. Looking closely at the drawer and carcass construction it's clearly handmade. It's quite a site to see the knife lines from laying out the dovetails on the drawers and the beveled undersides of the drawer bottoms that were clearly done with a hand plane. It appears to be a mix of solid mahogany, pine, poplar and mahogany crotch veneer.

Here's how it looked when we got it in the garage. There's a backsplash that I took off before snapping the pictures, it had been reattached badly by a former owner and had taken the brunt of a white paint splatter attack at some point and needed more work than the rest.

After a few hours of gentle cleaning to get the worst of the grime off:

It's finished in shellac so will be easy to repair. I already started a bit on the top drawers with some gentle rubbing with a denatured alcohol soaked rag. The shellac melted right away just like it were new and began repairing itself. That's pretty much how I'll repair the finish on the whole thing, just remelt all the shellac and polish like I would if I were putting it on fresh. Fortunately I use shellac for just about all of my finishing work on new projects so I'm very well prepared to work with it now.

One of the drawers - these are just about the most perfect half-blind dovetails I've ever seen, they look better than mine do new!

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Cherry Lamp Stand Done!
Entered: 2008-04-09
Edited: 2008-04-09
Type: woodworking

Whoo-hoo! Finally finished! Sorry for the lack of project pics after finishing the drawer, didn't have much picture worthy to show without going into in depth construction detail I'm trying to avoid now. Well here's the table in all it's glory:

And a few to show how it fits into the library:

Living up to it's name (that's an Aladdin #12 for the collectors playing at home)

Here's a lamp-lit shot of the top that shows the color much better than the other shots that used the flash:

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