Eleanor's Coffee Table

    Here is the coffee table that we finished last week. It is made out of butternut and it measures 17 inches tall, 17 inches wide, and 60 inches long. If you are interested in seeing some work in progress photos and discussion you can head here or here.

Sue's Pencil Post Bed

$6000.00 - $7000.00 depending on options

I meant to post these pictures forever ago. This is a pencil post bed my brother and I built as barter for the midwife attending Linden's birth. It measures 7 feet tall and holds a full sized mattress.  It is a traditional design built out of mahogany with poplar used for the bed deck. The bolt covers are brass.

The canopy (tester) is removable.

Front Corner detail

Shop Update 9/13/11

My brother and I don’t build from plans or full sized drawings, we build from rough sketches, mock-ups, a few conversations between us on how to approach the project, and from the unforeseen issues that arise while working with wood. Many woodworkers abhor this method of working--and with good reason. It is inefficient and risky; wood is expensive, and by working in this way you are gambling with your materials. However, when designing “in the wood” with the physical medium in your hand, the wood itself can lead you to many design choices that you would never find using a sketchbook or a 3D modeling program. When working and designing in the wood the color and texture of the wood is physically immediate and it can and should influence the design decisions you make. Occasionally, the wood will even force you to make decisions because of unforseen flaws or issues within the wood you are working. This is something you never consider in the white plastic realm of 3D modeling or on the blank page of a sketchbook. The reality of the material you deal with as a craftsman can wedge itself between yourself and your imagination. The material forces you into a conversation with it. This is the difference between the designer and the designer/craftsman. One designs within theoretical material limitations (i.e. wood must be this thick for this application, this fastener can support this much strain), the other communicates and builds with the material. Take, for instance, this small coffee table, which has two major design decisions which were forced upon us by our lack of foresight and by the wood itself.

The wood is butternut. The last time we were at our local lumber dealer we noticed a pallet of short pieces of very cracked and wormy butternut at an very discounted price. We had never worked in Butternut, and we love interesting wood at prices that are low enough to take risks with, so we bought the entire pallet. I built a bathroom floor out of most of it, and we set aside the longest and widest pieces to build small pieces of furniture. We've found the wood to be… moderately pleasant. Most of the pieces were fine to work but a few of them had a stringiness to them like you find in certain mahoganies, where the fibers of the wood do not respond well to planing or scraping. It is very light and very soft, and probably not a good wood to use for a dining table, but if treated kindly there should be no issues with using it as a coffee table.

We were free to design this piece however we wished within a certain spacial limitations (we were designing it with a certain living room in mind.) We had a rough sketch of a possible new design we wanted to try: curved outer leg assemblies with some type of textural layered wood serving to anchor a long thin top.

The problems began immediately. As soon as we started cross cutting the top pieces to the needed length it became clear that the cracks and wormholes were much more extensive then we had initially thought. Our disappointment over the wood eventually led to our first “ah-ha” moment after a few hours of considering the options. Seeing as we were about a foot short on length, it made sense to cap the sides with 6 inch breadboard ends.

We curved the outside edge of the breadboard ends to echo the curve of the leg assembly. The more difficult decision was how to approach the inside of the breadboard ends. Eventually we decided we had to curve the inside edge for aesthetic reasons; keeping the interior edge of the breadboard straight was not an option. The problem with this design is that having a curved breadboard can lead to awkward seasonal wood movement. During the summer the table should look fine but during the winer the top will shrink slightly, leaving a curved gap between the breadboard end and the body of the table. If the table had been any wider we wouldn’t have gone with the curved breadboards (as the table width increases so will the gap), but because the top is narrow, we decided the slight gap that will be there in the winter is more then offset by the attractiveness of the curve.

This is the problem/benefit by building by the seat of your pants. The problems you encounter while designing within the limitations of the materials lead you to solutions that you would probably never think of by designing with paper and pencil alone. Our initial design called for a normal tabletop; the unforeseen technical issues with the wood forced us to use a breadboard end. The curve we'd chosen for the leg assemblies forced us to curve the breadboard end, not for technical reasons, but for aesthetic. One unforeseen accident within the material can cascade throughout the design when building in this way. Life gives you lemons and you invent lemonade. Most woodworkers know this from first hand experience. A common experience is to have a finite amount of material (or time), so that if you miscut a piece, the design changes radically. You are forced to think outside the box.

The second issue occurred when we built the aprons for the table (those are the pieces of wood that connect the legs together beneath the top). Again, our material was too short to span the gap between the legs. We had three options. We could have used a splicing joint of some type, used a different type of wood for the aprons, or built up an apron assembly. We decided to go with option three. By doing so we were able to have the endgrain of the cross pieces punctuate the potentially long and monotonous apron. The apron assembly is so long, that without those two pieces of dark end grain breaking the space, the piece would lose its tension. This construction detail is another example of us adapting to the material in hand.

Shop Update 9/5/11

We are changing how we use our website by making it a bit more blog-like. From now on we will be posting work-in-progress updates for the pieces we are designing and building, starting with the current table we are working on in the shop. Along with these furniture updates, we will also be posting about other woodworking-related topics, such as how we make our own tools, how we mill and air-dry our own lumber, how to build any creative or useful jigs we devise, and the techniques we use. The blog will also feature posts on the philosophy of art, design, and the process of design we use to make our furniture.

In order to prime the blogging pump, here are a series of pictures from the current table we're working on. In the future we will update the blog as we are building the piece of furniture so you will be able to see the piece come together. But seeing as this piece is almost done here are a few pictures taken at different times throughout the process.

Yanni gluing up the apron assembly

The shingles roughly laid out on the two leg assemblies.

The D scraping a leg assembly in preparation for finish.

A detail of the joinery within the apron assembly.

One of the leg assemblies clamped onto the table top for joinery layout.

The assembly in this picture has no shingles on it yet.

Final pictures of this piece should be online by Friday or so, barring unforeseen difficulties in completing the piece. Also, as you can tell from the photos, the shop has recently been lent an excellent digital camera. This should greatly increase the quality of the photos we post. Thanks Jill :)