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Craftsman Home and Furniture from Scratch
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You enter the study through these double doors from entryway. The large display cabinet on the right was custom made to fit the recess in the front hallway by Amish craftsmen at Clear Creek Amish Furniture in Waynesville Ohio. When we first moved into the house, I optimistically said that I would build this piece. After my wife asked in what century, I relented and we commissioned to have it done.
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The front view of the study shows how I set the height of the paneling and trim to the trim on the window. The close up shows how I joined the bullnose trim of the window to the trim I placed on top of the paneling rail. Note that the height of the paneling rail is the same height of the trim between the two bullnose trim pieces over the window.
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The paneling is ¼” quartersawn oak plywood glued to the wall with ½” solid quarter sawn oak stiles and ¾” quartersawn oak baseboard and top rail. The tricky part of creating the wall was spacing the stiles evenly and covering the seams between the plywood panels. It required some careful calculation. Fortunately, I only had one long wall to cover.
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These are barrister bookcases that I originally built for an office to go along with an antique roll top desk. When we moved into the house, I no longer needed the roll top desk and the bookcases fit perfectly on each side of the windows. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. The barrister bookcases were built from plans from Woodsmith Magazine (woodsmithplans.com)
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The fireplace was the first project in the transformation of this room to an Arts and Crafts study and required some difficult design choices as well as a complex tiling job. I decided to install a down draft gas fireplace so that I would not have to vent it through the roof and the fireplace sits over my basement shop which made the venting fairly easy. The fireplace is a Town and County firebox that I had the vendor install. The following photos show the fireplace build process.
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I used steel studs to frame up the fireplace because it was easier to work with than wood and with the drywall covering, was very sturdy. Also, the whole house is steel studded and it is easier to get it square and is free of nail pops.
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This was my first attempt at tiling a fireplace or anything for that matter. One decision that it made it more difficult was that I decided to not cut any tile. That meant I had to use a number of different sized tile and play with different sized boarder tile. A mistake I made was that I used too much water in cleaning the black grout off the face of the tile and it turned the grout gray instead of black. The tile is Motawi tile from Ann Arbor Michigan. They were very easy to work with and helped me work out some of the tile placement problems.
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After tiling the fireplace, I covered the drywall with ¼” quarter sawn plywood and the corners with ¾” trim pieces cut at a 45-degree angle. Note that I used beads at the joints to hide any gaps in the joints.
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Then I built the cabinet and paneling to the right of the fireplace before any of the other cabinets or walls. The cabinet was somewhat tricky to build because the double entry doors were on an angle and I had to make the right side and top be at a right angle to the doorway so the door could open. This meant that I could not build a rectangular cabinet box out of plywood but had to use the right end panel as one of the sides. The result was that the door opening was a parallelogram instead of a rectangle. The question was, how was I going to get the inset doors to fit within the opening and leave an even gap around them?
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The answer was that I had to make the doors parallelograms instead of rectangles so they would fit the opening. I accomplished that by making the doors a little oversized, aligned the hinge sides with the sides of the opening and trace the angle on the top and bottom of the door and cut along the line with a track saw. I had to use a similar method to get the open edges to match and cut them off as well. I may later illustrate this in the shoptalk section of the website. The lesson here is always make sure your door opening is a rectangle! By the way, I usually use Blum soft close 35 mm hinges on my cabinetry because the allow adjustment up, down, sideways and in and out. You can’t do that with traditional leaf hinges. No amount of hinge adjustment was going to make rectangular doors fit.
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The base cabinets to the left of the fireplace are similar to those in the dining room while the design of the upper display cabinet came from the piece in the entry way. The top of the base is 2” quarter sawn oak that I found on sale at one of my wood sources. I milled a bullnose edge on all of the tops and the mantle. It is a little difficult to see from this angle, but you can be sure that I made all of the door openings rectangular so the doors would fit perfectly.
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The shelves are glass with an oak frame to let light from the cabinet lights shine through. The back of the cabinet is frame and panel quarter sawn oak to match the wall paneling.
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The window grilles were made to align with the glass shelves and fit over a single piece of glass held in by L shaped oak trim.
The study gets daily use with work, hobbies and TV viewing. I built this room when I was working full time and only had weekends or days off to complete the project. The room was constructed and furnished for approximately $12,000 with $7,000 of that being for the fireplace and installation. Estimates were that it would have over $30,000 if done by a craftsman if you could even find one.
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