Gamble House Motawi Tile Frame

We were quite inspired by our trip to the Gamble House in the Fall of '06. After the tour, we spent an hour in the bookstore garage. My girlfriend really liked the Motawi tiles they had there, and I was so jazzed about all of the joinery I had just seen that I told her that I would make her a Gamble-esque frame for them. Boy, was I naive! This frame took me at least 40 hours to make. I even had to quit working on it for a few weeks to get my head around how to glue up all of the parts in the right order. The spline joines were tough to align. I used pocket screws to clamp the major pieces together, but they interfered with the splines. I was really pleased with my scarf joint cheat. I actually cut the piece in half long-ways and cut the angle on all the parts with the same miter saw cut, thus ensuring they would perfectly align. I then ganged the parts together and ran them across the dado blade, making the hole for the big pin. All in all, I'm very happy with my one and only foray into tile framing. Of course you should never say never. She was obviously very happy with it, even after my bad moods from coming into the shop. Ironically, her dad gave her another Motawi tile, framed very elegantly and simply with his awesome craftsman finish.

Magazine Rack

I designed and made this magazine rack in the fall of 2006. It fit perfectly on the small wall across from the toilet, under the towel rack in my apartment. It was finished with Minwax's "Vermont Maple" water-based stain. Back then, it was the best Craftsman finish I knew how to produce. It was designed to fit one month's worth of all of my sailing magazines, except for "Sailing". The spindles are partially lap jointed into the rails. It was actually much more difficult to get the spindles perfectly centered and vertical than I expected. Now I would gang parts up and be much more efficient and accurate. This was also done on my contractor's saw.

Tabouret Tables

My first real foray into "fine" woodworking. A buddy of mine introduced me to the design when he made one for his son's nursery. It was from "Popular Mechanics - Mission Furniture - How to Make It". We later found the entire book in the Gamble House Book store and snapped it up. I ignorantly went to Home Depot and bought $100 worth of red oak and went to town on it. Somewhere in the middle of making the lap joints on the stretchers, I realized that I only needed two sets to make one table. I had inadvertantly made four sets, unconsciously thinking that a table required four legs. When I realized my "mistake", I quickly went back to HD and bought more wood for a second top and additional legs. With just a little more work and expense, I now was the proud owner of two tables. My buddy had already experimented with ammonio fuming, ala Stickley, so all of the research telling me that red oak doesn't fume well, I fumed them. They turned out a muddy green color. I then coated them with water-based poly and put them into service. The good news is that the red oak has darkened considerably over the last year, so I might not have to strip them and refinish them. This was the second to last piece I did on my contractor's table saw, so I was a tad limited. This piece was done in the fall of 2006.

What I Did With My Tax Relief Check...

For a long time now, I've been living out of one of those damned Rubbermaid dressers from Wal-Mart. It's made me feel a little white trash, so I took a couple of weeks off from working on Cathi's house and bought some quartersawn white oak for some plans that I've had for years. Six hundred dollars later, my truck now popping a wheelie up 680, I unload a couple of hundred pounds of QSWO, poplar and plywood into the garage. The dresser is called a gentleman's chest, and is a standard Arts & Crafts piece of bedroom furniture. I really liked the asymmetrical look and the flexibility of the cabinet opposite the smaller drawers.


I started cutting out the parts of the case (which gives the frame rigidity and reduces seasonal wood movement, which would cause the drawers to bind) being extremely careful to cut them as perfecty square as possible. Taking the time to make these parts perfect will yield serious dividends later on. I cut the dadoes in the case for the intersecting parts, making sure they all aligned perfectly. Any error would be noticeable and interfere with drawer movement. Once all of the parts for the case were made, I glued it up in stages, according to the directions and went to work on the oak. Carefully selecting the wood for optimal aesthetics. The medullary ray flake/fleck is one of the most striking aspects of quartersawn white oak. Ironically, Gustav Stickley used ammonia fuming on his furniture to subdue the ray flake to give his pieces a more homogenous look. Most woodworkers today take great pains in formulating their finishes to celebrate this effect, which in certain light and at certain angles is actually reflective.


I cut out the dozens of pieces of QSWO to the dimensions in the plans, labeled each with a part number and the "show" side, then starded applying the parts to the case. I had to cut wide slabs of QSWO into thin panels using a technique called resawing, which means holding the board on edge and running it across the band saw (the $200 band saw I got off of CraigsList in Austin for $80 because the guy didn't want to have to put it together). That was first for me and required me to make a special jig for the bandsaw to align the board properly. Luckily, I was able to plane the panels down to the proper thickness, which means I didn't get off center too much. The panels were prestained so no unstained edges might show. The sides went together first, then when cured, they were applied to the case. This formed the inside dimensions I needed to apply all of the oak to the plywood edge, thus hiding the plywood and making the entire dresser appear to be of solid oak.


The top got glued up and all of the trim pieces were applied. It was starting to look like a piece of furniture. Camping and sailing got in the way, but when we got back, I dove back in, finishing the case. It was now time to make the drawers.

Following the directions, I planed $100 worth of 3/4"+ poplar down to the 1/2" in the plans. Since the large drawers were taller than the poplar was wide, I had to glue them up. The next day, when picking up the cured 1/2" panels, they snapped off on the glue lines. Quite bummed out, I went and bought more 3/4" poplar and started building the drawers without planing it down. I reasoned that it would be much beefier than the flimsy 1/2" stuff. Unfortunately, this caused a whole slew of modifications in the drawer dimensions. When it came time to cut the drawers' lock joint, I setup the table saw for the original 1/2" thickness and proceeded to make the first set of cuts on all of the applicable boards. When I realized I had made a mistake, I then had to figure out how to salvage the drawer stock. I settled on a symmetrical "T" shaped joint, which was necessarily thinner than the sturdier "L" joint I should have had, but there was nothing I could do at this point.

I also have to mention that I originally had planned on making my dresser with dovetail joints, but after messing with the $200 dovetail jig I bought for the occasion, having the spindle come out of my new router (which is an all day repair job), and finding out that Stickley pieces have a lock joint, I settled on what I thought was going to be the lesser of two evils.


When glueing up the drawers, I realized I had made another mistake. The back of the drawer should be shorter than the sides, so the drawer bottom overlaps the back for nailing purposes. I had made the back of the drawer the same height, cut the groove for the drawer bottom in the back, and had cut the drawer bottom short enought to fit into the back groove. The drawer bottoms should've been 1/2" deeper. Because drawer bottoms are loosely fit to allow for seasonal wood expansion, they aren't glued in. As a result, my drawer bottoms are completely loose, captured in the groove on all four sides, instead of nailed/screwed in the back, so they have a nice, loose sound. I hope that when I pile my tidy whities into the drawers, the weight and muffling will compensate.

When fitting the drawers, each drawer had to be numbered and paired with each opening in the case, based on a best fit trial and error process. There were slight differences in the opening dimensions and drawer sizes that seem to me almost unavoidable, considering the care I took. Each drawer was custom sanded to fit into it's respective slot.


When I was happy with the fit, it was time to make the QSWO faces for each drawer. Once again, the required height was taller than my board width, so I broke out the glue once again. This time, everything went well, and I had some nice looking boards with glue lines that were mostly inconspicuous. The medullary ray flake was spectacular on the board I saved for these parts, and the front of the dresser is a writhing exploding celebration of QSWO. Each face was custom fit into its respective drawer, then double stick taped to the drawers with shims underneath to center them in the opening. Gingerly removed, making sure to keep the tape from slipping, the drawers were screwed to the faces from the inside. These screw holes indexed the faces to the drawers, so I was able to remove them and put several coats of hand-rubbed polyurethane on them, which really brings out the luster of the finish (which is TransTint Reddish Brown #6003, thanks to Kim's dad Joe). I still have to disassemble everything and put several coats of poly on the case, but otherwise, it's a done deal. It weighs about 200 pounds, so getting it into the house is going to be interesting. It exactly matches the headboard I made before we left Austin, so I'm on my way to a complete bedroom set. I looked online, and comparable dressers are going for $2,000-$2,500, so I think it was a good investment. I'm looking forward to it being in place, loading it up, and moving the Rubbermaid dresser out into the shop for tool storage.

Setting Up Shop

I've recently become addicted to blogs like treefrogfurniture and woodwhisperer, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This blog is entirely dedicated to my mediocre woodworking skills. For pertinent details of the rest of my life, check out the Larsenoster blog. For those of you that may not know, I'm seriously into Craftsman/Arts & Crafts/Mission style furniture. I've made a fair amount of it so far, and am advancing with every project. I started out with a picture frame, then made a coat tree, some tabouret tables, more picture frames, a headboard, and most recently a dresser to match. I'll post pics once I get this blog up and running. I recently joined LumberJocks, which is a really cool site, with lots of excellent projects. I will endeavor to keep this blog updated with my projects. After the dresser is finished, I'll be making a dog feeding stool and probably some more picture frames. I've got a mica lamp kit that I need to do something about too. My girlfriend needs a piano bench with some storage. Ultimately, I'd like to build at least one Morris bow arm chair, a side table to go with it, another lamp, a grandfather clock ala New Yankee Workshop's Tall Case Clock, and new dinette set. I'm a big fan of Stickley, although I'm willing to stray. We also went to the Gamble House last year, and the Greene and Greene style is really appealing to me, although as accent pieces. All the cloud lifts really are a bit much for me. Anyhoo, check out my LumberJocks projects until I can get this up and running.