Furniture Builder Extraordinaire

Happy holidays, friends! It's been a minute since my last update but trust I've been busy 🐝. You may notice a few small visual changes here as I've updated the header up top to show the 10 albums I've been listening to the most on Apple Music and implemented pagination for posts on the homepage. I've tried a few times to significantly change the blog layout but always just end back up at the one I have. No need to change a good thing I guess? Anyway, I've been working on a project for the last two months that I'm excited to share. That being that we recently transformed the north-facing wall of our living room.

There's been this credenza-esque thing in our living room for about 2 years. I built it not long after we'd moved into the house since 1) I wanted some kind of storage thing under the window that the cats could also use to nap on, 2) Charlie wanted a place to sit down and put his shoes on next to the door and 3) I wanted to try my hand at some kind of woodworking project. I jumped in the deep end trying to build a 12-foot-long storage unit but after weeks of cutting out of square wood and having no plan or idea for what I was trying to build, I finished it. It didn't look awful in photos, but it was pretty ugly in person and not at all practical as it was just six awkward cavernous boxes screwed together. For two years there were some piles of books and a stack of reusable bags in that thing with several of the boxes just never used.

About 2 months ago I set out to re-build the sad credenza with what I'd learned from the first attempt. I knew I needed to decide what exactly this thing needed to be beforehand and actually put together a 3D model of what this thing would look like. Thus this SketchUp model was born:

The most important factor for credenza v2 was that I wanted it to store my record collection and my record player. My friend Cameron built me a really nice record storage unit a few years ago when were still renting. When we moved into the house it didn't fit anywhere in the living room so it was relegated to my office where it's lived ever since. I've always wanted to be able to play and store my records in the living room so added 4 pull out drawers to be able to flip through records like you would in a record store as I hate having to try and read the spine of records, and it was a nice plus that it would showcase the artwork. It also needed to store the PlayStation and all the television peripherals on the far left as well as be able to store some blankets since we lost our blanket storage when we got a new couch.

I toyed with the design for a few weeks before finalizing the idea and then spent about 1 month worth of weekends cutting out all the pieces for the frame on my back porch pop-up wood shop and lastly another weekend building the frame in place.

At this point, I was feeling awesome. It was looking like a real credenza and I was seeing my 3D model come to life. The next part was putting together the drawers, which was tougher than YouTube made it look. I got there eventually but not before building an out-of-square drawer that wouldn't fit the drawer slides as well as having to readjust all of the drawer slides multiple times. It was one of those "the last 10% is the hardest part" moments. After all the drawers were in I added handle hardware, permanently attached the top, and that was that.

After finishing Charlie said "It looks great! But we need better bookshelves now." He was right. I installed those sad-ass book shelves the week we moved in here just to get something on the wall. I had considered building something, but in the end, we just bought some shelves from the String Shelf System (it's Swedish!). Charlie has also been pushing me for months to add color to some of our walls. I've always been a white wall person but marriage is constant compromise, thus the north-facing wall where the credenza lives is now Benjamin Moore's Durango.

This has been a fun and rewarding project but I'm totally wiped out from it. We have no plans for the holidays which I'm really happy about and I'm looking forward to sitting around and marveling at my new furniture/shelving/wall color and waiting for 2025 to get here.

See y'all on the other side. ✌️

• joseph