New Cabinet

Sorry it has been so long since the last post. Not a lot of exciting stuff has been going on around here. We have still been trying to get the place cleaned up from Mr. Ice Storm. I will have a few posts to make this week though so be sure and check back. One thing I started working on before the ice storm that got interrupted was I was building a new cabinet for the house and more specifically the dining area of the house. Those of you who have been here know that we have one big open room that is the entry, living room, piano room, kitchen, and dining room all in one. One thing we wish we had more of is kitchen cabinets/storage. I built a cabinet for the kitchen a while back that matched our kitchen cabinets to help with this. This new cabinet was the next piece to help solve that issue. I finally got time this past week to finish it up and I was able to debut it for our Valentine's Party at our house on Friday night. I built it with oak so it should be pretty solid. I tried to stain it close to the same color as our table and chairs, barstools and behind the couch table. They are all a dark walnut/cappuccino color. This proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be because those things are all built out of different woods (even thought they are all basically the same color). The table and chairs are out of parawood, which is a type of wood I really like but isn't readily available around here in lumber form, the barstools are pine and the couch table is mostly veneer. I am going to pause here in talking about the new cabinet to talk about parawood since I am sure lots of you don't know about it or have never heard of it. Parawood comes from the rubber tree which is the tree they extract sap from that makes natural rubber. After many years of harvesting the sap for rubber, the trees get old and stop producing very much sap and so they are useless for their primary purpose. Someone discovered that this wood of the old rubber trees is great for making furniture. It has a dense grain (comparable hardness to maple), minimal shrinkage, attractive color and acceptance of different finishes. I am a big fan of it and wish I could get it to build furniture. Now, back to the cabinet. I could not find a stain that would match the color of the other furniture so I had to use 3 different colors of stain layered to get close to the right color: first coat of dark walnut, next was red mahogany, and then dark oak. It is not an exact match but it is close. I think this might be my best piece of furniture I have built to date. The design I came up with worked out well, it came together really well and it looks good without very many mistakes. I think it is definitely something that we will hang on to for a long time. I enjoy designing and making furniture. Maybe one of these days I will get some more and better tools to be able to make all kinds of furniture. Since this post is getting long, I will get to the pictures.

Here it is.


Side view


Open View- it holds lots of stuff which is what we needed


As you can see I made the top part of it a 6 bottle wine rack, I like that part the best.