This a piece requested by my wife, and it was a convenient way to use up some red oak I had lying around the shop. The design was pretty simple, she gave me a clipping from a magazine and I copied as best I could from the photo. I’m not sure what style this is, can anyone help me out?

I used 3/4” boards for the frame and 1/4” oak veneered MDF for the panels. There’s also a 3/4” maple board at the bottom since it wouldn’t be seen. I face-glued two oak boards to make thicker posts, which I think gave a nice feeling of depth to the piece. I bought a piece of oak cornice moulding for the top but I hated it and ended up making my own with a simple cove bit. Joinery is pocket-hole thanks to my Kreg mini jig.

The finish is Minwax English Chestnut stain with 3 coats of Deft satin lacquer sprayed on.

All in all this was a fun and quick project, I kinda hope someone else in the family requests one.

This bench was a special request from my wife. She’d wanted one of these forever, but never got around to buying one. So when I got myself a shop set up I volunteered to build her one. No problem, right? Well, being that this was my first real project in years, I ran up against a few re-learning experiences that made for some slow going. There are a number of things I would change if I were to do this project over, but overall I’m happy with how it turned out, and my wife loves it.

We spent some time looking at dozens of these commercially available on the internet and she picked out what she liked and didn’t like from several of them, allowing me to draw up some rough plans.

The box and the back of the superstructure are 3/4” maple ply with 1/4”solid maple used to trim it out. The sides and top shelf of the superstructure are 3/4” solid maple. I got some nice figure on those, especially the left upright support. The plywood was a huge bonus, it was just a stack of maple at Menard’s, but looking through the stack I found one piece with an awesome bird’s-eye figure to it. I decided to use that as the back piece so as to really show it off. I still have some of it left over waiting for just the right project. The coat hooks are drawer pulls, we couldn’t find any hooks we liked, so we improvised. I don’t have a lathe so I found a guy selling bun feet on ebay and was very pleased with them.