This post is a retrospective on some of my favorite project challenges over the years.
When I was showing my neighbor's daughters some shop activity a few years ago, their father referred to joinery as making your own puzzle pieces and then putting the puzzle together.
I think it's a pretty good analogy for someone unfamiliar with the trade.
But as I've thought about it, the whole trade--each project from concept to final stroke--is about puzzles. The builder has to design the project (or find the right plan) and figure out how to execute each detail with the tools and materials at his or her disposal. When you make mistakes (you always do) you have to find a way to fix them (or incorporate them into the design--future post).
These are the day-to-day puzzles.
What really gets me excited about a project though, is when someone needs specific piece, for a specific space. Sometimes the specificity is design/form, sometimes it is simply filling an odd space...sometimes it involves creating new space...often, a combination of these.
I'm not exactly sure why, but it's this ability to puzzle out how to meet someone's user needs and style preferences in odd spaces that I find so fulfilling...especially when I can bend the norms of typical designs.
Here are a few examples.
This homework station below was for a family that has a small back room adjacent to the kitchen where the kids do homework and projects. They originally wanted a work surface that would go the whole length of the back wall, but they need to access two different doors on other side of the back wall, which meant they would be sliding the thing back in forth. So, I did some research on found existing hardware that would allow the wings of the table to retract under the table top (traditional table leaves would have been a drag, because they use it ever day).
As it turned out, the family's house was filled with quarter sawn white oak. So I made the homework station to match, cabinet door panels are in flat sawn oak.
A separate project was a set of matching bookcases. The customer has a beautiful, small condo and a large book collection. The space for the shelves is vertical--floor to ceiling--but narrow (only 22 inches wide). While a simple built-in solution might have worked, he is interested in period details and wanted something that would make sense in his turn-of-the-century (20th) home. Plus, he likes exposed joinery. Solution? The Jefferson bookcase, modernized.
Here is a picture of the traditional Jefferson Bookcase. It is a piece that was in Thomas Jefferson's Monticello (reportedly). Each box is individually constructed so that the owner can easily move the boxes around. Reportedly, when Jefferson moved/sold his books to the Library of Congress, they simply nailed boards to the front of the boxes, stuffed some old papers in there, and tossed them on the wagon for the ride.
While the exposed joinery was a definite detail we both wanted to include, the bottom plinth and other flourishes seemed over-the-top for the space. Plus, we needed to maximize book storage. By simply removing the plinth from the design and adding a crown to the top, the pieces have the charms of the original with a more mid-century modern look and feel.
Adding to the specificity, the customer wanted the bookcases to "flow" through the wall, so this case has a mate that backs up to it on the other side, with the same dimensions...as you walk through the doorway, it feels like it's one piece.
Finally, the same customer has a rounded wall in his bedroom and wanted matching bed side tables that fit into the space and follow the curve. My initial thought was that this was a simple matter of figuring out the radius of the circle (establish the starting point in the space, and then measure to the wall). However, geometry is a little more complicated than that. Fortunately for me, I have a friend who is a mathematics professor. In this situation, because I was not working from the center of the room, I actually was building a portion of an ellipse. To draw one of those, you have to set up a large board, establish two foci, use a loop of string, and run your pencil in the loop of string around the large board. Then, cut out (in this case) the quarter of the ellipse.
I used this to create a full size model, but in real space, and old homes, just using math is never good enough--the pure reason of math never matches up with actual buildings--walls are not square, curves are not fair…so I used this model to get close and then dialed it based on a final site visit.
In most cases, my full scale models are very rough, just good enough to make sure they will fit in the space. in this case, I actually swapped out the top and created a paint-grade piece.
In this end, it looked like this:
The final project I’ll discuss here is an unconventional drop-leaf table. The customer wanted a small table that they could use as a breakfast table in a nice, well-lit nook in their living room. The table needed to fit four people, squeeze into a smaller space when not in use. Additionally, the customer wanted something light with a mid-century feel, specifically, hairpin legs. I experimented with many different solutions, but finally landed on the design below. Using hairpin legs for a drop leaf is tricky because you don’t have the normal construction elements of a table (such as aprons, etc.) that would house moving parts and so on. Moreover, the legs don’t fold up or down like you might see on a gate leg table. The solution was to make a moving table top support (a bracket across the expanded leaves) that also held the legs. The final challenge, or perhaps the most important challenge was in ensuring the table was stable in both positions. This actually required an unconventional leg arrangement.
In the end, I spent way more time designing this table than I spent building the final piece. The photos and video below show how it works. All photos and the video below are by Shawn Bruce.
