This was my first box I built for my wife for our first year together. I believe I built this back in 1998 or so. I picked out a box of her favorite chocolates and made this box to fit them. I presented it like anyone would present a box of chocolates but I made the box hehe. Wood is oak with a light pink aniline dye which has faded and then clear coated with high gloss oil poly. The inside is lined with felt and the entire piece is made from one piece of wood. When you look at the edge of it the end grain rays run from top to bottom. The top is actually very tight and does not fall off. I carved a light relief into one of the arcs which is just enough to pry the lid off with your finger tip while not being obvious.

This is my wife’s steamer trunk I built for her about 7 years ago. The top is two pieces of 3/4” oak plywood cerfed every 1/4”. The dimensions are in the neighborhood of 40” long x 20” tall x 18” deep. This is fairly light considering its size. I built it out of plywood after having built a friend a flat top version of the same thing only a little smaller out of 3/4” oak 9 years ago. The smaller flat topped trunk was for a friend and “she” was headed to college for her first year of education. Well….... it was a wee bit heavy for her but she loved it hehe.

This is a detail of the cabin I am just finishing building. There were 4 inside corners which I chose to assemble a bit differently. I wanted the inside corners of the logs to look good instead of just functional as most do. So this is what I came up with. Each log is coped around the face of the other and a 1” maple dowel is bored into the seam to completely seal the air gap between the two. Believe it or not these copes have opened up a lot. When I had first coped them they were to tight to fit a piece of paper in, however the logs were considerably high in moisture content and have since shrunk. Alot of difficult trim / woodwork in this home to say the least.

These are some old photos I dug up of my first “high end” kitchen. Its a clear cherry flat panel kitchen. Everything is book matched if you take a look at the base cabinet close up you can see the entire door / drawer setup is one solid piece of cherry. This was a difficult kitchen to renovate because the customer was occupying the home and had 4 children living their as well. I had to install everything in a 2 day period and as you can see even still I was working around their kitchen items hehe.

Now for the funny part. This being my first large scale project I had no shop tools. I built this kitchen and installed it with the following.

Bosch Circular saw w/ home made straight edge
Porter Cable router
Porter Cable random orbit sander
trim compressor
air gun for the finish
basic handtools

It was an extremely hard project to do in this fashion but it was an experience I will forever cherish. It gives you an immense appreciation for the shop tools that make it so much easier / faster.

This was designed and built for my Mother’s kitchen in her old farm house. It is solid oak with no fasteners, plywood or engineered material. I’ll have to take some more pictures in color since this black and white is the only one I can find. The entire unit was designed around her metal canisters, a water machine, some baking goods and had to fit in between 2 door casements about 8’ apart. The Joinery is a mix of splines, half laps, dadoes, rabbets, hand cut dovetails, mortise and tenons, as well as the butcher block. The cove crown is hand made as well. The left corner cabinet houses a 5’ tall water machine with no shelves. The right corner cabinet is full of shelves for baking goods. The upper cabinet was for various things with the focal point being the series half blind dovetailed drawers running from end to end. Its hard to tell in this picture but he drawers are cut from a single figured piece of oak which if standing back 10 feet or so looks as if its a single piece running across instead of drawers. The lower cabinet is built to hold her metal canisters with 2 cutting board slots directly above it. The butcher block is made up of 3/4” slices of maple about 2” thick and is designed to slide out for an occasional sand/refinish. The entire unit breaks down into 4 units as it is quite large. 7’ tall by 8’ wide to be exact. The finish was just a 2 coat clear poly.

This was an order for a simple but elegant piece of furniture that had to have the strength to support a 52” Flat screen TV. The couple was an Italian couple from Sicily Italy and had a lot of antique furniture but no set tone for the house. They wanted this to match a table in the adjacent dining room and this is what I designed and built for them. The picture is terrible but the top is 3/4” oak with an intricate profiled french curve on all 3 faces.