Two adults with professional careers and a college age son living in a one-bathroom house poses some interesting considerations during certain times of the day. Especially when the inhabits require simultaneous use of that multipurpose room. Now you can’t do much about the thrown, when you need it you just need it. Baths and/or showers can be prioritized and scheduled, however we can do something about the monopolizing of the sink and mirror area. Hmmm lets see, shaving and brushing your teeth seem to be relatively quick tasks, I guess that leave us to the art of making one’s self even more beautiful/handsome, doing certain muscular flexes while staring at ones self, or combing the hair for the um-teenth time, god knows one of them young girls may not take a send look if every hair isn’t perfect, but that is another story.
SOLUTION
What if SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) had a nice area of her own to perform them beautification tasks; it won’t fix the son problem, but we can deal with that later. A vanity would be nice, but not just any vanity it would have to match the existing bedroom furniture. “… hey I got an idea SWMBO says … you could use some of them tools you seem to always come home with….” Well there are certain arguments a galootish type must always avoid, surely it is not beneficial to point concern to the necessary art of bringing home yet another needed tool.
The new vanity would have to match the night-stands, since they had the most unusual characteristics of the bedroom furniture. I figured incorporating the reed front and the curved top drawer into the new vanity would go a long way to making the piece match the set.
The existing nightstands are made out of a medium colored oak so I decided to use quarter sawn white oak for the vanity. A trip up north to one of them smaller saw mills that cater to the demands of the weekend wood warrior yielded some nice stock for the job. Now all I had to do was to create the matching vanity design. THE DESIGN
I used TurboCAD to design the vanity. I suppose any design method would work just as well, but I had a copy so I decided to use it, besides it can’t hurt to sharpen ones CAD skills.
A simple approach of 2-D design works fine with me. It is easy for me to read and I can build off completed parts of the CAD model to make each section of the finished design. For instance I started with the approximate overall size dimensions (e.g. length, height, depth) to fit the space where she decided it would end up. Next I took into consideration my wife’s proper seat height and leg clearances as I want her to be able to sit comfortably at the vanity.
Then I created an inventory of the items she wants stored in the vanity to determine how many and what size each of the drawers would be. We came up with a design of three drawers on the left, two drawers on the right and a center top drawer. The design will make the bottom right hand drawer appear to be two separate drawers but it will be just one big one to hold hair dryers, tall cans or bottles and such. The design will also incorporate a long thin drawer in the middle, with each of the top three drawers incorporating the curved shape with the bead on the top and bottom drawer front. This will follow the profile of the legs from the side view.
The face frame, drawer guides and drawers and were next. Since these are closely related I worked on them all simultaneously.
Once the basic design was completed, I created a Bill of Materials (BOM) and moved into the shop to start Dimensioning the lumber…
MAKING THE CARCUS
I started with gluing up the legs and dimensioning them to size. Next I marked the proper locations for all of the various dados, mortises, tenons and rabbets on the legs and end pieces. The dados in the sides of the legs are used to hold the drawer supports in place. There is also a mortise in each leg to hold the end panels. The end panels were made out of solid pieces of the quarter sawn oak and a long tenon was cut on each side to fit into the matching mortise in the legs. To cut the dados, tenons and rabbets I uesed a combination of tools including:
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Clicking on any of the pictures will bring up a full size view
Once the legs and end panels were made I glued them together and began to make the bottom drawer supports. I had some small pieces of soft maple left over from a previous job so I made them out of that. To add strength to the supports I used pocket screws and glue.
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By the time the drawer supports were completed the ends had dried and it was time to plane the ends flat. I used a Lie-Nelson #62 Low Angle Block Plane, which worked very good on the extremely hard wood and without tearout.
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Next it was time to do a complete dry fit and start the glue up.
I glued up each side of the vanity separately then put the whole unit together. This was the best way to handle the glue up, because each end was sturdier. The center section was comprised of the bottom center drawer support, a 1x6 piece of maple back support and the face frame.
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I picked out the wood with the most fleck in the grain to make the face frame. I guess I could have made it with half-lap joints, but I chose pocket screws at it cut down on the work and the joints are pretty strong.
MAKING THE DRAWERS
I used a variety of tools to shape the curved face top drawers:
The drawers were a challenge to say the least as it had been a while since I cut so many dovetails by hand at one time. Cutting the half-blind dovetails in the White Oak fronts was like chiseling on glass; boy that stuff was hard! Needless to say, I did a considerable amount of tool sharpening during this project.
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As I mentioned earlier, the top three drawers have a curved face with a 1/4" bead running horizontally across the top and bottom of the front face.
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From time to time I will update this page with further results
- Finishing the Case
- Building the Stool
- Making the Mirror