Oh! I Have an Idea!

So ever sense I cut up the burl yesterday for the drawer fronts I’ve been confronted with a problem. The length of the burl pieces is too short. Ideally they would have been about 21-inches long, but they only came out to be a little under 17-inches.

The plan all along has been to band them in a fluted molding of some sort, but I never envisioned that to be more than an inch or so wide. I need to get to about 23.5-inch wide drawers so I could have 4 drawers evenly spaced with 3-inch stiles between them. I could beef them up a little with thicker banding, but because it is proportional, if I went all the way to 23.5-inches I would end up with 9-inch high drawers. I think it would look odd. Along with the top and bottom rail, the drawer area would be approaching a third of the over-all elevation of the bottom part of the cabinet.

I thought about doing 5 drawers, because I have enough burl, but this lead to other problems, not the least of which is the latches I bought. I only have 6. I would need another latch and the odds of me find a matching one are infinitesimal.

So I started to think about ways I could take up space in the middle of the cabinet. I had a lot of ideas but I ended up with a tile panel. The idea is that I would have an inset section in the middle of the cabinets that would have some figural or pastoral scene on a set of majolica tiles. It will raise the complexity of the cabinets, but I think it is a nice solution.

So in keeping with my tendency to rush in to design choices without thinking them through, I raced on to Ebay tonight after work and bought the 3rd antique Victorian tile panel I saw.



This is a circa 1900 tile panel that is 6X18 inches. The listing says they are hydrangeas. They could have told me they were pussy willows and I would have shrugged in agreement. Regardless of what they are, I think its really very nice and it will go nicely with the tile surround on the fire place that sits opposite the yet to be built cabinets.



I’ve always called this lotus flowers with lily pads, but again, what the hell do I know about flowers. It is still a thought in progress, but the plan so far is that the tile panel will be inset on the lowers, and then a matching inset on the uppers would be a stationary etched glass panel with more flowers.

This plan also solves another huge issue that I haven’t talked about yet. I’ll save that problem for a future post.