The living room: Furniture

 June 2026

As I want to mostly try and recreate the furniture, soft furnishings and nick-nacks that I can remember. I am starting with the biggest, and most difficult, project first.  It is a sideboard that my parents had from the day they married and I have owned it for over 15 years here in Australia.  I sold it a number of years ago as I had become tired of the dark furniture. So, I have to go by photos and the best I could find is the one below.  My parents took this picture upon my dad's retirement with all the presents he was given.

So, I sat about draughting the plans for the project.  The biggest problem would be the carved doors and drawers.  I have done a class in wood carving, but that was 15 years ago and I have forgotten most of what we did.  

I do have the tools and therefore started to create a test piece, but... the tools are not sharp enough and I can't remember which one I used for what. 

I also have a Proxxon aka Dremel with all kinds of attachments.  I started to draw a plan and carved it with one of the carving bits.  This worked reasonably well.  I am happy enough to try the doors and drawers later.  I leave them for last and start with the shell of the cabinet first.

To make it easier on myelf I cut out all the parts and laid the patterns out on the timber that I have, which is not much. It's hard to come by here and I need to work with what I have right now.  I am using Bass wood for the cabinet, Steamed Pear for the carved parts.

I nearly forgot to stain all the parts before gluieng.  I was a bit too eager to start...  In the above picture you see the part that I had accidentally started glueing together, but luckily I had not stained anything with the glue.  And on the right is the test part that I had carved. I wanted to see if the woodstain would be the same on both types of wood.  The colour is oak, the timber that the original sideboard was made of. 

Another challenge was the bottom part with the legs.  The wood is too hard to cut and I had to shape it with the scroll saw.  It was near impossible to do the smaller rounded bits as the light was not good enough to see the lines on the dark wood.  Instead I used needle files to shape the end bits.  

The legs were cut out in the centre to carry the long decorative beam.

So far I am happy with the results.  Next I will be working on the top part with the drawers.

The drawers have been made and fit fairly well, considering that they are not all straight, but since they are hidden from view and still work well I don't feel the need to make changes. 

I have raised them slightly so they sit on gliders that I can put candle wax on if needed.

The dividers were of different hights and instead of building the other two up I cut the highest one down.  Silly, because now I have to build all three up again so that the top sits straight on top of the dividers without bending down and resting on the drawers.

I have a lot of veneer and will use that to build them up.  I have also used this trick with a shelf that was just 1/2 mm too short.  I will take a picture later.  All I need to do is stain the front and it's as good as new.

Even though I have the right tools and machinery, it is still very difficult to avoid even a fraction of a millimetre difference. 

Next I have been working on hinges.  I need 2 sets of 4 and the set for the middle doors was supposed to be different from the other set, like an ornate, almost Tudor style, hinge.

I only have the ordinary bright and shiny brass hinges which I don't like and the ornate ones that you can buy are probably too long, so I have to put my thinking cap on.

I followed a few tutorials on YouTube and tried to make them myself.  Not an easy feat.  I tried two different ones at first with card and paper.  They were very hard to make as you had to roll them onto a pin.  White paper I would have had to paint, card in the right colour was to thick.

I tried a detachable type of hinge next and seemed to be more successful, so I made 8 sets and I may use those. I will think of a solution for the decorative part.

 

The next update will follow in a new post.