As work continues on the Armoire the thought occasionally crosses my mind that this is a big undertaking!  Having discussed my procedure on the blog about how I intend to go about it and not hearing suggestions regarding other ways to construct this leads me to think my plan is a sound, albeit: complicated one.  One of my neighbors who I have done some work for in the past, asked me for a favor and I was glad to take a break from the Armoire to fulfill it.

Wine Bottle Storage

Quite a number of years ago we had re-purposed a media niche in his home by my building a liquor cabinet for the lower part of it.  The upper part of it was mirrored with glass shelving to hold bottles and glasses.  All that was missing was a place for wine.  Oh yes, you may have heard me say that I very rarely stain — this project was one of my few exceptions.  Their kitchen cabinetry is adjacent to this wall and has a pickled, white wash Oak finish so this cabinet had to match.  I also added an end table with the same finish at a later date.  He had purchased a wine rack that had a dark, antiqued wooden top on it and wondered if I could replace the top to match the rest of the woodwork.  In this picture you see the finished project along with the original top.

This project gave me a nice break from the exacting work on the Armoire, started with smooth planing a piece of Home Depot Oak:

Smooth Plane

Not sure if I’ll ever have enough practice to really perfect this technique but if what they say is true …… “practice makes perfect” this can’t hurt!  Next I used a very technical drawing technique to radius the corners:

Washer & Pencil Radius

Which gave me a chance to use my new Auriou rasp from Lie-Nielsen which worked very nicely indeed!  Then a gimlet to do the holes:

Gimlet in Use

Now, all that remained was to apply the finish.  I used a couple of coats of rattle-can spar varnish to protect it after the stain dried overnight.  I delivered it this afternoon and it’s exactly what he needed — back to the Armoire!