Oak & Ash
As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been pretty busy this fall. I took a longer hiatus from blogging than I had planned, but now I'm back at it.
Earlier this year I moved to a new house and that has provided the opportunity to try making a couple of pieces of furniture to help fill out some of the rooms. For this post I'm sharing the designs I came up with.
The first item is a bracket to support a pendant light. It is partially supported with wires attached to eye bolt screws; I was inspired by the Erasmusbrug.
Here are photos of the bracket before installation and then in use. This map is in the background.
The namesake piece of this post is a cabinet I made for my bathroom. It uses oak for the face frame (the plywood is poplar, although I could have used oak plywood) and has a "mission oak" stain. The baskets are unstained ash from Ashland. The cabinet is 30" tall by 14" wide by 12" deep. The basket drawers sit on bars rather than shelves to give it an open, floating look.
Here are some photos during construction. I first assembled the face frame, which is held together using mending plates; the bars to hold the baskets got attached to it using brackets. The box of the cabinet came next. Finally, I attached the face frame to the box, using finishing nails.
It still needs to be sanded and have a clear coat applied (and then have the legs secured to the slab), but I've almost finished building a coffee table for my living room. The tabletop is a live-edge slab (which came as a kit) and the legs are made from 3/4" copper pipe.
Here are some photos of the coffee table during construction. I used a cutting tool to get the straight lengths of pipe I needed: 6 x 15" for the verticals, 16 x 8" for the segments along the length of the table, and 4 x 12" for the horizontal ties. These straight lengths of pipe were connected with elbows and tees, held in place with epoxy.
I've also found room in my new house for some furniture I've built in the past. On the left is a side table in the kitchen, and on the right is a bookshelf and CD stand in the study.
To finish this post off, here are a couple of links related to a book review I wrote earlier this fall. This article is a review of a review of Factfulness, and here is an infographic on cognitive biases, some of which were discussed by Rosling in that book.