All the drawer fronts and doors were completely replaced. The outside edge of each door and drawer front has a bead detail of moulding applied proud of the surfaces. The inside edges of the rails and stiles (closest to the panel) have a routed bead detail. Stiles and rails are jack mitered together with loose mortise and tenons. The door panels are floating. Each panel has 1/16″ bookmatched crotch grain (front and back) veneered to 1/8″ baltic birch plywood resulting in 1/4″ thick panel. The pull out drawers behind the doors are melamine with custom walnut edges with full extension slides.
I made a rookie mistake when planeing down the drawer fronts. If you look at the before pics, drawers 5, 6, 7, & 8 show a perfectly bookmatched grain pattern before planeing. I didn’t plane each bookmatch equally, resulting in a less than desirable bookmatch. Not a big deal, but I am my harshest critic!
Next time I will just remove the face frames and build new ones. This process was very labor intensive. I milled 3/16″ veneer strips, removed the varnish on the existing face frames with a card scraper, block plane and sandpaper, and glued and clamped each piece separately. The gluing and clamping took forever.
The “new” face frames, drawer fronts, door rails/stiles received 5 coats of Waterlox satin applied with a rag and wet sanded flat before the last coat. The door panels received 5 coats of Waterlox gloss applied with a rag and wet sanded before the final coat.
-Tom Hoffman
See the Gallery Below:
