Making More Art From Scraps

A few months ago I was building a set of cabinets for an artist friend of mine. He wanted two cabinets built to hold some old drawers he had lying around in his garage. They had to roll on heavy casters, mount under an old door he was going to use as a work surface, and the drawers had to be on full extension slides. Well, the drawers weren’t made for the slides, and there were chips in some of the drawer fronts, so the project looks like crap, but he’s a painter and he wanted me to build him something that could get messed up and beat to death and stand up to the pounding. He didn’t care what it looked like and didn’t want to pay for æsthetics. So I delivered the cabinets pictured above.

But that’s not what this is about.

I built the frames for these cabinets out of 2×4s because I know how rough my friend will treat them. I half-lapped all the joints. I used some extra stock to set up for cutting those joints and, when I was done with the project, there were two test pieces, just sitting there, begging to be touched.

I cleaned them up, glued them together, drilled three holes with my 1 7/8” Forstner bit, finished the piece with some satin polyurethane, and now I have a brand new candle holder to sell. It seems to work perfectly when placed at the corner of a table, and it doesn’t take up much room.

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