stools + cabinet

The stool project continues apace. I am making three of them but opted to cut all of the joinery for the first one as a kind of “prototype that I’m 90% sure will work.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when I put it together, as shown above. The proportions look okay, the footrests and seat dimension feel right. Of course I had done drawings and consulted references for all of this so theoretically I knew all of that was true already. But you know what they say…nothing is certain in this life except death, taxes, and a significant chasm between theory and practice.

Since I wanted the efficiency gains of batching work and felt confident in the process after the first stool, I decided to build the second and third at the same time. I had already roughly milled all of the parts for the stools but now brought everything to its final dimension.

Next I laid out all of the joinery with my story stick and got to chopping and cutting. It is nice to have all the design, milling, and layout done. Now I can just go outside, sit on my little bench, and enter a chop and saw flow state.

I have 22 more mortise and tenons to make then its on to the final phase of cleanup. Next up I will finish plane, chamfer the edges, cut 96 wedges for the tenons (2 per tenon x 16 tenons per stool x 3 stools), install wedges and glue, oil the wood, and then weave the seats. Onwards.

For my Japanese Joinery class project, I am making a small cabinet to sit atop a dresser and hold makeup. I designed and redesigned for weeks and eventually landed on something quite simple — arguably even a bit boring. The main thing to recommend it is that it seems feasible. I can imagine myself doing the steps required to build it. And I’d rather have a simple cabinet that exists than an ideal one that doesn’t.

I’m building the cabinet out of some ash that my teachers got from the very special salvaged wood purveyor, Arborica. Despite getting about 30% more than what I need in order to accommodate mistakes and/or imperfections in the wood, it still feels high stakes to work with something that I can’t just pop down to the lumberyard to supplement. I think that’s probably a good thing and the correct level of “positive fear” (reverence?) with which to approach wood.

So far I’ve prepared all of the pieces, done a sample dovetail with mitered corner (shoutout to my Canadian king Rob Cosman for this invaluable video), and cut three of the five dovetail corners and one of the four mortise and tenon corner/connections.

I’m pretty disappointed with how the miters have come out so far — there’s really nowhere to hide on ‘em. But the cabinet will hold together and I feel at peace that it’s close to the best I can do — I did careful layout and sawing, my skills are just not there yet. I am hopeful that the two remaining corners I have to do come out a little less gappy.

I’m eager to finish the up the carcass and then move on to the back, drawers, inner shelves, door, and mirror.

Also excited to receive the hardware, which I inadvertently imported from China. I ordered it on Etsy from a seller called “BKRiverValley” which in retrospect does sound like what AI would produce if you prompted it to generate a shop name that would fill an undiscerning millennial’s mind with visions of artisanal upstate NY cabinet hardware. It wasn’t until I checked the tracking updates that I realized I had neglected to apply the “item location = United States” filter that I’ve come to rely on for e-commerce tariff avoidance. Alas.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.