First Woodwork in Six Months

  • Posted on: 20 July 2015
  • By: Jay Oyster

As you can tell from my posts here, I've not taken much time to woodwork the last few months. We were disappointed in March by our inability to get a mortgage. The banks changed the rules on us and will basically not allow us to buy a house this year. That disappointment and the fact that I'm stuck again in a temporary home shop caused me to, albeit temporarily, give up on the whole idea of working wood in my home.

Ikea four drawer cabinet converted into a stained-glass storage cabinetBut the last few weeks I've been hankerin' for some sawdust on my hands. Adriana gave me a concrete excuse this past Friday by asking that I 'repurpose' an old Ikea dresser. It seems fitting, no, to re-establish some woodworking skills by tearing apart and rebuilding a piece built by the custom woodworker's scourge of the North? I'll need to post a full project page, although it's not really much of a project. Still, it resulted in a custom piece of furniture that just exactly meets the needs of someone in our house.

My wife is a really talented worker in glass. She's made quite a few pieces in stained glass, and she's developed almost as large a collection of glass as I have collected wood. Currently, she's storing it, wrapped in paper, and piled in cardboard boxes. Needless to say, this makes it hard to know what she has and harder still to make design decisions. This kind of shelving is quite common in stained glass supply houses. It's not meant to be pretty, but functional, and she seems quite happy with its function.

Project page: Glass Cabinet Conversion from Ikea Chest of Drawers