Kitchen Island

This was the first piece of furniture I started out of the lumber from my parent’s back yard.
This was also the first piece of furniture I designed myself.
A week or two after starting this project, I designed and built the wide chest of drawers within a month. So it counted as the first self-designed and self-built project I completed.
The carcass is solid cherry, with some birch plywood (the bottom, top, and shelf). There is some maple used as inlay in the front frame, and some ash in structural support (bottom shelf) positions. The drawer boxes are maple.
  • This project took 615 days from start to finish. I worked intermittently.
  • It contains Cherry, Maple, and Ash lumber from my parent’s back yard. (There’s a little bit of birch 3/4″ plywood picked up from Northwest Lumber Company that was leftover from a prior project for shelves and a base for the granite top).
  • There were 48 mortise and Tenon joints.
  • There are 10 raised, book-matched panels, all of which were raised by cove cross-cutting on the table-saw.
  • The entire piece is coated with boiled linseed oil.
  • The exterior is coated with 2 coats of Garnet Shellac, mixed from flakes.
  • The last coat of shellac was rubbed with #0000 steel wool and a slurry of paste wax / mineral spirits.
  • The final finish is full-strength paste wax, hand rubbed. (Five and a half hours I’ll never forget)
  • The top is a hunk of granite fabricated by Olympia Stone on the NW side of Indianapolis. We paid half-price per square foot since this was a remnant.
  • This was my first from-scratch, self-designed, and self-built piece. I started this project before I started the 6-drawer low chest of drawers for the nursery.
And now, a photo gallery of the project from beginning to end…