My wife is patient. She does not pressure me to make things. That helps explain the 30 years it has taken for me to turn out a couple nightstands. I am grateful I can make what I want when I feel like it (pretty much).
When we first set up house, we bought a couple “table rounds” from Venture in Kansas City for about $4. Tripodal, shaky, chipboard covered with a tablecloth, they were home to nighttime water glasses, alarm clocks and TV remotes for 3 decades. They survived multiple moves including one from Kansas to North Carolina. I’m not being nostalgic. I’m expressing my shame.
Nightstands vaulted to the top of the list when the pandemic struck. We dance and when the virus interrupted social dancing a creative vacuum opened. I’ve been making things non-stop, including these nightstands.
My first decision was to use someone else’s plans. I’ve never done that before. I was eager to follow a recipe instead of blazing a trail. It was a nice idea that didn’t happen.
I really liked Michael Pekovich’s “Make a Table From a Board” plan (FWW #243–Nov/Dec 2014) but it was “too spindly” for my wife. She liked an Arts and Crafts nightstand we found online. I could have bought the plans, but the plans were expensive. I decided to blaze another trail and use Pekovich’s plan to make tables that looked completely different.
I chose cherry for its serenity and color. It’s been a long time since I worked with cherry. I was reminded how easy it yields to a sharp edge and how unpredictable the grain direction can be. Care must be taken about exposure to light. It can be difficult to finish without blotching. Pros and cons.
I followed Pekovich’s process for laying out and harvesting parts, especially the way he identifies material for the legs. His uses straight grained, rift-sawn wood for stability and a consistent appearance on all 4 sides. This is the first time I envisioned parts in 3 dimensions in a board and sawed the parts free relative to the tree’s growth patterns rather than the sawyer’s cut lines. It’s a better way of thinking about wood use. There’s more waste but I think having done this one time, I’ll always be looking at boards in 3 dimensions.
I milled my parts in the usual way, following Pekovich’s advice for stickering and resting. I tried to follow the “table from one board” vision. My boards were very similar. I struggled to keep my tables separate; that is, to make sure I used one board for one nightstand and the other board for the other nightstand. It seemed like every time I marked a part with a “I” or a “II”, I was jointing or planing or sawing off the mark. I could have built one table at a time, but that seemed and still does seem inefficient.
The joinery process was great fun. This the most traditional build I have done. Traditional mortises and tenons (instead of floating tenons or pegs). Tenons with mitered ends. Double tenons on narrow pieces. Hours and hours of happy hand work with a wood that loves to be worked.
I found myself working more slowly than usual; a change I attribute to the pandemic. I followed advice I often ignore out of impatience, like doing full dry-fits and rehearsing glue-ups. I learned how these time-consuming steps pay off. I made a lot of minor adjustments to my joinery that would have been nightmarish with glue involved. I still made lots of mistakes but I’m not going to show them to anyone.
I learned long ago to finish parts as you go. Working with finished parts is a learned skill, but it’s loads more efficient than trying to finish inside corners and crevices after a piece is assembled. Finishing parts while a piece is being built is more chess, less checkers. Lots of strategy is involved.
The tabletops were a challenge. I originally intended to use granite tops to withstand water glasses sweating through the night. I decided they would look (and be) too heavy. I considered tile, glass or maybe a poly finish just on the tops. I settled on copper sheeting with some custom colorations from an online art supply store. Cherry will eventually darken to match the copper color spot-on. The stuff came pre-lacquered. It was easy to cut and laminate on a stable substrate. I wrapped the copper panels with a cherry edge to complete each tabletop. I joined the corners with keyed miters using walnut keys cut proud and faceted to emphasize the A&C design. I chamfered the bottom edge all around to lighten the appearance. I couldn’t be more delighted with the outcome.
There were setbacks of course. I dropped one of the tops after the initial glue-up, damaging one corner and spoiling the perfect miters. It went back together with good miters. Making them perfect again would have required starting over and I didn’t have the wood. Sigh.
I also had something go wrong with the glue-up for one table. I don’t know why, but one table wouldn’t pull together square. Relax, it looks fine. I’ll let you imagine the gesticulations required to fit a square drawer into a parallelogram. The drawer glides sweetly and no one needs to know how.
I struggled with choosing drawer pulls so I made my own. The little saddles are cherry with walnut cross members, pinned with walnut dowels. They have a lovely and inviting feel.
My finish is dead simple and ultra-traditional. I prepped the surfaces to 600, ragged on a wash coat of shellac to raise the grain, and sanded it smooth with 400. Then I padded on several coats (5? 6?) of shellac using a 1# cut, followed by steel wool and wax. It’s a lovely old-fashioned finish, fast and easy and forgiving, with plenty of protection for pieces like these.
These pieces were a joy to make. I learned that making smaller, more sophisticated pieces is more fun for me than making pieces like dining tables and base cabinets. Not that I won’t make any more large items… I will, but I learned a great deal from making these little tables. I also discovered a new sense of patience and gratitude for spending lockdown time learning and growing and making things that we will enjoy long after the pandemic is a distant memory.