Woodworking

These are some of my furniture and general woodworking projects.

The first Greene & Greene style piece that I made was a coffee table, based on a photo in a magazine of the one in the Gamble House in Pasadena, CA. The table has many classic Greene & Greene features including the pegs and splines that I used as my web-site name. For more information and explanation, please visit my Greene & Greene page where I have provided a brief introduction.

I also made a pair of side tables using design elements from Greene & Greene, but not based on any particular original piece that I am aware of.

I installed French doors and hardwood flooring in my den/music room.

Here is a portable kitchen island that I built for my daughter, to match her existing kitchen cabinets

I originally built this cake-stand in high school but it sustained damage transporting it to Canada. I salvaged the circular plates and some of the hardware and re-built it using Greene & Greene design elements. Compare the old one on the left with the new one on the right.

I designed and built these cabinets for each side of my fireplace. They are quite simple boxes really, built from plywood and MDF and painted. The doors are poplar wood, stile & rail construction with tempered glass panels covered with a semi-opaque film. The design is cut with a utility knife and peeled to make the "window mullion" pattern. Low voltage lighting was fitted to illuminate the upper shelves. The right hand one has an extending and swiveling slide to hold a TV and allow it to be viewed from different locations in the living area.

I built this vanity and medicine cabinet for my basement bathroom. It is intended to match the bathrooms on my upper level and comes pretty close. The cabinet carcasses, drawer boxes and shelves are melamine with iron-on edges. Doors and drawer fronts are solid maple and the doors are raised-panel construction.

I converted a narrow kitchen cabinet that had three shelves and held 6 wine bottles into this wine rack that holds 20 - much better! Wood is maple and is based on a design I saw in a show-home once. Can you find the dovetail joints?

The largest project I have undertaken so far is this wall unit that I built for my son's house. It measures 16'-4" wide and I built it in 8 main sections plus the bases and the little corner piece which I finished after installing the main unit and taking final measurements. It integrates with a shelf on top of an existing pony-wall. Construction is plywood and MDF painted like the ones in my house - shown above. Doors are same construction but slightly different pattern for the window-mullions. Low-voltage lighting was also added for extra effect.

Here are some of the smaller projects that I have added to my house.

Below is an artist's easel that I built as a gift for my daughter who is taking up painting as a hobby. It is built from plywood, left un-finished and is based on a design from the studio where I take my own art classes. The legs are made up from two layers of plywood glued together, approximately 1-1/2" square.

The table lamps in our living room had nice stained and leaded glass shades and panels but the wooden pieces (made in China) had shrunk and twisted in the dry Alberta climate. I removed all the glass, metal components and wiring and re-made the wooden portions in a Craftsman style using mahogany left-overs from the bedroom suite project. I stained them with aniline dye and finished them with wipe-on polyurethane. Photos of the originals (left) and the re-built ones (right) are shown below.

One of the re-built lamps with the shade installed.

I built a sauna in our basement. For details of construction and finishing, please go to my "Sauna" page.

I built this wall unit complete with electric fireplace for the apartment we moved into in 2017. It is 9'-0" wide x 8" 0" high. It replaces a corner fireplace with a single mantle/shelf so provides much needed additional storage. It is also sized to accept up to a 60" flat-screen TV.

These upper and lower cabinets each have a central wine rack that holds 6 bottles and provides lots of additional storage for our kitchen and a great place for our coffee station. I built these to match the existing kitchen cabinets in our apartment and added a quartz counter-top to match as well.

I built this Artist's Pochade Box to use for my painting supplies. It is designed to be a grab-and-go means to carry my paints, brushes and palette but is also equipped with a small easel and a means to hold and transport masonite or canvas covered painting panels up to 16" x 12". More photos and details are available on my "Pochade Box" page. I used re-cycled or salvaged materials extensively, except for the hardware.

I make a selection of small keepsake boxes for the ladies in my family or for gifts or display. More photos and details are available on my "Small boxes" page.

I made this end-grain cutting board from short pieces and off-cuts of various hardwoods in strips of different widths, planed to uniform thickness and glued into two "blanks" slightly larger than the finished cutting board. Then the blanks were cross-cut into strips the thickness of the cutting board and alternated and oriented to give a pleasing appearance before being glued together into a single piece. After rough sanding I routed a channel with a core-box bit all around both faces to collect liquids and around the edges for decoration and to assist with picking it up. I applied a food-safe mineral oil as a finish to protect the wood and enhance the appearance.

I made these pastry rolling pins by gluing up a 2" wide blank using a series of different hardwoods and synthetic material and then cutting it on the bias to create roughly square turning blanks for the lathe. After turning into cylinders and tapering the ends on the lathe they appear to be twisted when viewed in a certain way. The really colourful material is salvaged from some kind of synthetic product used for engineered flooring but looks really nice when included with the cherry, maple and walnut hardwoods. "Too nice to use" I'm told, so I made a display stand for them.

Since acquiring a "new" lathe in the workshop, I am enjoying doing some turnings of items such as bowls, vases and ornaments. More photos and details are available on my "Turnings" page.