Finished With These Drawers

There are benefits to writing on a woodworking blog for a length of time. You get the chance to connect with some people you may never meet with otherwise. Those connections pay off. For instance, a little friendly internet banter and the incessant posting of progress pics of a nail cabinet on Instagram and you too may get Chris Schwarz to offer to send you a Calvin Cobb postcard for the door of your nail cabinet.

When they arrive, you know it's Christmas, (or close to it) because  he sent you a few additional postcards to round out the collection.

Thank You Chris.

The veneering of the drawers went well. Considering it was something I had never attempted before. I'm not going to share the process I used because I can't say I've enough success or experience to believe I did any single thing right. In the end the veneers worked and that's great, but I believe in absolute dumb luck and that's possibly the case here.

The veneers only highlighted some of my drawer fitting errors. Well, less errors fitting the drawers and more errors squaring up the egg carton dividers. For whatever reason, doing that before I secured things into place didn't occur to me. Live and learn.

But I knew how to fix hide mask the error. Shadows are swallowed by black so the answer was to paint the inside of the cabinet black. I used a primer followed by a good quality tempera paint. Why tempera? Because it's what I had on hand. The good stuff is better than the cheep crap they hand out to kindergartners by the gallon, the pigments are much more vibrant. They aren't the most durable of paints and the black will wear off in places over time. I am perfectly OK with that. I love when a piece of furniture looks lived in.

I added a layer of wipe on poly over the black, It will add a little wear-ability to the paint. Not too much I hope. I wavered and flip-flopped on the knobs. The wooden ones I bought didn't fit the screws that came with them, frustrating. I fished around and came up with some new screws that worked better. Pan head pocket hole screws. Not a super satisfying solution, but what the heck. It's a nail cabinet for the shop. I soaked the knobs in the last bit of a very, very dark oil based stain for a day and let them sit and dry for two more days after that. The dark little accents are pleasing.

The inside of the cabinet is finished.

Now we can start on the door. Raised panel on the outside and I'm working on ideas for the inside.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf