night stand

So Robie has been asking me for a night stand for ages now. I have one on my side of the bed, but she doesn’t. So I have to hand her the glass of water when she’s thirsty. I have to hand her her phone when it rings (or more commonly, when she uses it as an alarm…. every morning)I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in the basement in me woodshop and my most recent project is a bedside table. The first question is what type of wood to use. I was leaning towards cherry when one day I was cleaning up a bit in the yard (there’s a thought) and I was reminded that I still have some wood that I removed from the house when I did the windows project last year. I couple 2×4 from the walls and some trim pieces. I’d been wanting to do something with it other than throw it away. Why not use it for the table? It’ll give it some character and it actually is quite nice wood. Tight and straight grained. My house was built 85 years ago; they used the good stuff back then. The only issue is the paint and the nail holes. So after going over the boards with my metal detector to find the last bits of nail, I ran them through my planer and the wood is quite nice. I cut and glued some of them into a tabletop Next, I got out me bench top chisel motiser and the tenon jig for the saw and built a simple table: One note about a tenon jig. They’re only useful if you KNOW that the wood stock is flat and of the same thickness. This comment makes sense if you’re actually thinking about cutting tenons. But Robie wanted another shelf under the top. So I glued up some more wood and made a shelf. This one didn’t need to be as thick, I didn’t want it to seem overly hefty. I took some more of the wood and cut it down the center to make two boards from one and glued em up. I added some support rails: Here are some pictures in better lighting: It still needs some more sanding and some sort of a finish, but that’s turned into Robie’s job. She has more patience for that kind of work. Notice some of the black marks. That’s where nails used to be. Over the years, they rusted and turned the surrounding wood black.