Erika's Vanity
Trig to the rescue
I have often said that “a boy can’t have too much lumber,” for if I am going to build furniture and other wooden stuff, I need a lot of lumber, preferably without having to buy it. Because of this and my love of scrounging, I accumulated at least two lifetimes worth of salvaged heart pine and purloined cherry, and if it isn’t just going to just sit there feeding powder post beetles, I need to turn it into furniture. This has gotten more and more problematic, because I have built just about all the furniture we need (or can accommodate). So, when Erika asked if I would build her a dressing table (aka a vanity), I immediately said sure, no problem. That she wanted it made of salvaged heart pine was good too, for I had stacks and stacks of it.
There is little point in pursuing a craft over a long period if you don’t get better at it. Therefore, the complexity and difficulty of my pieces have gradually (sometimes suddenly) increased. Where is the challenge, I said, in building rectilinear boxes? Anybody with a carpenter’s square and a tape measure can do that! There followed several pieces in which at least some of the sides didn’t make a 90-degree angle (on purpose) with the sides they met, and that was followed by a chest of drawers with bowed sides and bowed drawer fronts.
The sketch I made for Erika’s vanity was the product of a momentary inspiration (a rush of poop to the brain, as my friend Cliff would have said), and lacked most of the standard relations expected in furniture. Yes, it had a flat top so the make-up wouldn’t just slide off onto the floor, and yes, the mirror was vertical, but the sides were not only canted from the vertical, but also swung around like a snake, making a recess for legs and bulges to hold drawers for Erika’s beauty supplies. Clearly, it was true to my mantra: how hard can it be?
How do you build sides that are not only slanted from the vertical, but whose projection is a continuous and reversing curve with tighter curves at the bottom than the top? The answer? Trigonometry! Think about building a barrel, but not with a circular cross-section at all levels like a standard hogshead, but a variable, snaky curve that does not close on itself. Something a drunken cooper might build a day before he got fired. The walls are built of tapered slats whose top to bottom taper varies, and whose edges also have variable angles. Let’s say that you want the slat to lean out more and to form a tighter curve with the next slat. So, you change the taper from say, 3.2 degrees to 4.5 degrees, and the edge angle from 93 to 95 degrees. If you want it to snake in the opposite direction, you change the edge angle from 93 degrees to 88 degrees. In this way, you can build a snaky wall with the tilt and curve-radius you want. Simple, eh?
I needed space for Erika’s legs while she did her make-up, and I wanted to add shelves behind the door at both the right and left sides. I made a sketch with pleasing curves and angles, as well as useful dimensions. Building it was pretty much one stave at a time--- what angles would give the next increment the desired curve and tilt? Then I set the angle guide and the saw tilt, and there you have it! Gluing the staves together suggested problems with strength and alignment, so the edges of the staves were grooved to hold a spline that would align them and provide strength when glued. Since nothing was square, clamping this whole mess had to be done with straps. I added snaky braces at the top and bottom edges to stabilize the shape and to which I could attach the top. It was a strictly empirical job, no engineering drawings or blueprints ever intervened.
With the walls complete, it was time to build some shelves. The triangular, vertical wall on the left was easy to make into a door--- it just needed a piano hinge on its left side. The curved wall on the right was more challenging. I sawed out a goodly piece of it, installed a piano hinge on the right and a latch on the left side. Then came shelves of variable shapes and spacing to fit into the available volume. I was taking no more chances and made the slides of aluminum channel, not wood.
Well, a top would be nice, but why make a plain, glued up, rectilinear top when you can get really fancy with a sunburst construction? Once again, trigonometry reared its angular head, and once again, splines helped keep the whole thing stitched together and stable. Just for grins, I added a semi-circular brass plate at the origin of the sunburst, as well a brass trim around the edges.
What was still missing, of course, was a mirror. After all, this was kind of a necessary item for a make-up thingie. In keeping with the sunburst design of the tabletop, the mirror part was also a sunburst pattern with the mirror more or less in its visual center. OK, I admit, I bought the round mirror and didn’t make my own using Tollen’s Reagent or vapor silvering. Not everything has to be DIY, does it?
So, here’s the vanity with the mirror installed. The mirror is surrounded with a strip LED that is dimmable and tunable from warm to cool light, remotely controlled by the gadget lying on the top. The view from the back shows the sunburst design of the mirror back clearly, but also the shelves inside the dresser, and the wiring and power source for the LEDs. This opening was later fitted with a piece of quarter-inch plywood.
Well, that’s pretty much it. The movers got it to Erika’s place in Chicago without reducing it to toothpicks, and it is serving its function as a make-up dresser very well, and will do for some time, I hope.
As a small addendum, building furniture using lumber air-dried for well over a century in Tallahassee, and then installed in an apartment in Chicago has its “challenges.” There is this inconvenient thing called “moisture equilibrium.” In the Chicago winter, heated apartments (and who would want one that is not heated), are super dry, and the shrinkage of air-dried lumber challenges anything built in soggy Tallahassee. It becomes important whether a board is tangential sawn or quarter sawn, and whether end grain and cross grain are glued to one another. Some of the issues are easily resolved--- the brass trim was detached, shortened, and reattached; the doors that no longer close were trimmed to fit again, and a crack or two that don’t show can be ignored.
I am not exactly holding my breath about the future of this vanity as every Chicago winter sucks every vulnerable water molecule out of it, but my fingers are firmly crossed as a less drastic measure. From now on, everything I design for Chicago and build of air-dried Tallahassee lumber must consider what happens in the desert that is Chicago’s indoors in the winter. To air is Tallahassee, to forgive is not Chicago.
I loved reading this and the vanity about which it was written. I was reminded of the thoughts of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The best moments in life usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
To say this is a work of art doesn't begin to describe it. It's a true masterpiece, as is your ability to envision and skillfully construct a unique and beautiful creation. Your scrounging is icing on the cake!