She came to town to build with me

My youngest daughter came to town to build with me. She has some skills and a lot of desire. She is also a quick study. A friend of hers is having a baby and she wanted to build her a toy chest.

We spent a day just talking about the design along with plans and hopes.She is out of a job owing to the down turn in the housing market and is looking for a chance to get back into it. She was on the list to enter the carpenters union training when the bottom dropped out. So to keep her feet wet and maybe just to hang out with me, she came out and we built.

We needed a design that could be finished over a long weekend because she had to get back to her deli job on Monday, so we took a short-cut. We went to the home depot and bought a couple of pre-glued up pine panels which saved us the time gluing up the 18" sides. We made our own panel for the top and used plywood for the bottom.

For the top I took my time picking out boards. She wanted some knots or figure in the top so I finally settled on a couple of nicely figured southern yellow pine boards. We glued them up into a 20" wide panel and then used my hand planes to flatten and thickness the panel. Started with the no.6 and finished with a low angle no.4. It looked great. The low angle plane is based on the old Stanley no.164 and is a champ at smoothing soft wood. We had a blast taking turns at the plane.

We cut the sides on the table saw with the blade set at 45 degrees for mitered corners. She originally wanted to do dovetails or box joints, but in the interest of time we settled on mitered corners and pegged them together with square pegs.it looked pretty cool when done. We came up with our own skirt shape along the bottom. She knew what she wanted and we just messed around with different sticks and cans to draw in the curves. We made a template and used it to cut in the skirt with a router - all good fun!So then she really got hooked on the idea of a an upright at the back of the lid. We shaped the top edge into a curve to compliment the skirt treatment. That piece we glued and screwed to the lid. After that we shaved the feet even with the no.5

Well, the thing looked too boxy so we thought we'd give it a molding down low to kind of break up the box and adjust the proportions. I think it worked, but we were still a little surprised at how big it was when done. This happens a lot to me. I'll draw out an idea, but until it's made, I don't have a precise idea of the space it will fill. We came up with our dimensions using the "hands" method. You hold your hands apart until it looks right and say "oh, about like dis".

She really liked the color of the what-not table (see my photos). The inside got a couple of coats of de-waxed shellac to seal the pine tar into the wood and keep it off the toys.The exterior was stained with Minwax "Sedona Red" stain. A nice antique red color. When the stain dried we were just about out of time so we screwed on the hinge and installed the lid brake.

She took it home with her and put on the varnish which I think was Minwax wiping poly.

It was great fun and really gave me feelings of pride to watch her knock the work out on this thing. She and I had been through some hard times and I really felt that weekend we climbed a really important hill together.

She came to town to build with me and it was great!