This shipping company called Saia destroyed my shipment to Canada (here's some free advice- don't use Saia) so I had to rebuild this set. It was a bummer, but I think I like the way this turned out even better the second time. I'm especially fond of the headboard, which is rather wondrous I must say.
This nightstand design was born from the following question: if you strip down a nightstand to its most essential elements, what do you have? My answer: a small table for a lamp, alarm clock and/or book and a drawer for whatever you’d rather not have on display. From there I arrived at this design, sort of a night stand without sides, or a see-through night stand, or however you want to think about it. My favorite part about this design is the fact that the drawer sliding elements are inside the drawer, so that the drawer appears to be floating from all angles beside the back. The added bonus to this design is that, when stripped down as described, the nightstand becomes light enough to float off the ground, attached to the bed with 4 screws.
The bed and nightstands are from solid rosewood, and I also built a sweet candle chandelier from the same material (photos will be forthcoming). The drawers on the nightstands are solid rosewood (minus the bottom) as well. Also notable is the fact that the slats are reclaimed from the legendary Acres of Books bookstore in Long Beach, recently shut down. These slats once composed book shelves- pretty cool, right? Now I’ve got to figure out how to get all of this to Canada- wish me luck!
I made this table top for my friends Josh and Rafi, a.k.a. Form Los Angeles. It's 5 planks of solid cherry joined and cut to an oval with a cove edge detail. I used some type of dark, non-toxic oil that Josh and Rafi found. The legs were fabricated by someone else. The overall effect is pretty strong.
These are some snack/painting tables that I built for my son Luke's school. The top is plywood with birch veneer with solid birch around the edges, everything else is solid birch. They are oiled and coated with polyurathane. I lucked out on the tops- there is some really interesting grain. Luke was really disappointed that I didn't paint these bright colors, like the old tables that they replaced (as a side note, I'm pretty sure that the old tables were there when I went to this preschool). His teacher was thrilled though, and she bought clear table cloths so that the grain could be seen while the kids eat their snacks.
They initially wanted the coffee table to be built from teak, but that turned out to be too cost prohibitive. We settled on clear redwood with a clear oil finish and polyurethane. My friend Tom helped me with the polyurethane, which was enormously helpful. I'm not sure on the source of the design- I just copied a picture that Josh and Rafi provided. I'd have to say that it turned into a really good copy though.
The glass side table caused me much frustration, as mentioned in the below post. To make a long story short, the first piece of glass cracked, the second had holes drilled too small, and I ended up with just a couple hours to get the third piece of glass in place and get everything finished to meet the deadline. All of this resulted in a piece that was not everything I had hoped (likewise for Josh and Rafi) but it still looks pretty freaking hot.
The evolution continues...here, I built another storage bed, but corrected a problem I recognized the last time I built this bed and sold it with a set of night stands. Namely, if the night stands are next to the bed, you can't open the rear drawer. So here the night stands rest on one leg, placed just behind the rear-most drawer guide, thus allowing the drawer to slide right under the night stand. My friend Nate came up with the shape of the leg (thanks Nate!). Ryan took the pictures (there's a link to his site somewhere down the page here.
I built this same bed for Jana and I when she suggested that I should build her a bed, and that it should look like this. It was a natural progression then to start thinking about building night stands, though there was a lot more involved with them than I had imagined. Primarily, they took a lot longer than I anticipated because they required jointing numerous walnut boards to reach the desired depth- something I'd never done before.
