OK, after moving four times in six years, I had two projects that I'd dragged along all across those moves . . . my workbench, and my wife's jewelry cabinet. Both projects were approaching 10 years from start, and I was both embarrassed and tired of not having them done. So last year (2019) I finally finshed the workbench. And in January 2020, after doing a bit of a reorg in my shop, I was finally ready to make the final push to complete the Jewelry cabinet.

I didn't even know for sure if I had managed to keep all of the pieces to build the rest of it. So the first thing I did was to assess the project and find the cut parts in amongst the piles of wood that I moved between the various houses. I did find all of the pieces, especially for the side and front doors. But it was a bit of a jigsaw. The side doors, particulalry, had several large pieces of fairly thin quarter-sawn  sycamore that I need to glue together into panels. And I knew that I couldn't get two faces that were clean, meaning two faces of white sapwood. So a big part of the next step was deciding on an approach to glue up and size the panels for the side doors. 

September 2018 - I got some help to move the case up from my basement shop to the garage. Thank you very much Kamil. Once it was in place there, I worked on getting the crown molding installed, as well as the lighting. Once those were in place, I took a couple of weeks to paint the whole piece with General Finishes "Charleton Blue" chalk paint. It took two coats with a quick sanding after the first. 

October 13, 2018 - This is the weekend I finished this project. Sprayed the whole case with lacquer. (I don't have a HVLP spray rig, so it was rattle cans from the  big box store. $12 a pop for those cans, but the result was worth it. ) 

Then it was the struggle of getting the 2 1/2" thick cherry seat installed. Boy, that was a challenge. It had fit perfectly in the shop, but of course, after the paint was applied to the case, and of course the higher humidity of the garage space where it's installed, it didn't quite fit. I had to haul the seat back to the shop and sand and plane a bit more to get the clearance needed to make it fit. It's a very tight fit, specifically in the center where the seat fits tightly around the center vertical shelf piece.  

Mudroom Bench Project — For everything but the solid wood benchtop, this was a project to be supplied quickly and conveniently at the big box store. I did spend more time than normal looking through the plywood and poplar choices to make as clean a selection as I could given their generally lower standards. But I ended up bringing home three sheets of 3/4" birch ply, 1 sheet of 3/4" 'Sandply', 3 sheets of 1/4" birch ply for the backs, and numerous pieces of 1x6 poplar for the face frames and crown molding.  I also thought about whether or not I wanted to route the bead board backing of the seat area, and ended up by pre-formed and primed whitewood  bead boards. That should save me some time.  I also bought some sacraficial plastic sawhorses. 

I brought it all home and stored it in the garage for a day. I checked out the physical location of the bench and realized that I have a power outlet to move. (And clearly some Halloween decorations to move . . . oh, and my old Kaypro II computer, purchased in 1983.) As I was working, Liam and his friend from the neighborhood Elly showed up with her dog Remington. I enlisted Liam to help out. 

Then I set up my saw horses and my cut list, and carefully cut down the 4x8 sheets into the approximate widths I needed for all of the larger pieces. After cutting them down, I carried down into the basement shop through the door  on the other side of the house; the one place where the basement isn't below grade.  For the smaller pieces, I had Liam carry them. He's 11 . . .old enough to start earning his keep.

The mudbench is going into the front corner of our garage. As I described on the project page, our garage has a raised deck at the front where the previous owner built a small workbench, and then some storage space where we've got some shelves. The area near the side door into the kitchen was previous just a catch-all space where the kids threw their backpacks and jackets and such. We still want to use it for that, but we want to be able to have some organization, and so I won't be tripping over their shit all the time.

I mocked up the basic space with correct dimension in Sketchup. (See at right)  The model doesn't include the railing along the near edge of the deck, and up the left side of the stairs.  The workbench is just a 2x4 and plywood structure that I've represented by an accurately sized rectangle in the middle of the deck. 

So I took the bench design I worked on over the holidays and placed it in the model to see how it looked spatially, and as a design. To my eye and my wife's eye, it looks good there. She particularly likes the color.