A little bit of pine and a whole lotta love

It seems rather basic I guess, but it impresses a lot of people. A few pieces of pine or red oak or cherry, a saw, some tender sanding and a few coats of stain and voila, a table or chair or dresser is born.

The following is a snapshot of the pieces of furniture Nate and I have built over the past few years. Sure, Nate has the equipment and the engineering know-how, but I have the vision and creative genius (so I'd like to think, as well as a fetish for electric sanders). A more powerful couple, there has never been.

A Really Tall Table

After listing furniture-making as one of my hobbies in my coaches bio, a fellow rower expressed her interest in the prospects of a table. This table was designed for a large room with high windows and a cathedral ceiling. It was the tallest undertaking to date and followed our love of simple lines and hidden drawers (there are two built in the front).

Butcher Block

Three years ago I had little if no furniture. Other than a few bookshelves that I wrestled out of the trash bin and my sister's futon, I was relying on my rubbermaid bins as coffee table, foot rest and storage. Fortunately, it was right around this time that I met the ever-so-talented Nate, who posited the idea (I know I said I was the creative genius, but...) of making furniture. He asked for my designs which consisted only of a flat surface supported by four sturdy legs. He kept asking questions about drawers and hidden leafs and where I wanted my magazines to reside. I, on the other hand required only one design element: butcher block. Perhaps it goes back to my love of deli meat, but I've always loved the look of butcher block furniture.

As you can see from the pictures above, the coffee table was born out a love of efficiency and symmetry; two loves shared equally by Nate and me. If you ask Nate he'd explain with a giddiness hard to describe, the beauty of the hidden drawer. No one will ever know where I hide all the pizza hut menus!

After the coffee table, came the table of all tables. Before we made my dining room table, I had only 3 bar stools, measuring approximately 30 inches high. Too low to make eating at the countertop which outlined my apartment a possibility (I hadn't thought of measuring it before buying the stools). Without table, my roommate and I ate sitting on the stools, balancing plates on our lap and drinks on the third unused stool.

The table followed the same rules as the coffee table: symmetry and efficiency must reign. As you can see in the pictures below, a hidden leaf adds an element of mystery, as well as the possibility of available space to the table (and hopefully more food!).

Furniture as Wedding Gift

One of our next big furniture initiatives involved a wedding. Nate's brother Dave and his fiance Jill were getting married in August of 2003. A dresser we decided was the best gift we could give to a furniture-less couple going off to grad school in the fall. The dresser would reflect their love of nature as well; we selected a flower pressed pull from Restoration Hardware.

The dresser proved to be more work than anticipated. I believe Nate was up very late cutting the wood for the drawers and assembling the frame; while I spent much of the morning on the day of the wedding, sanding and staining.

The muscle men will hang your coats

Over the summer, Nate indulged himself in a furniture project. A rack for his coats and other belongings was needed by the entrance of his house. There was no influencing his design for the rack, about which he had thought long and hard; but there was an opportunity to influence the design of the hooks! An evening stroll through one of our favorite stores, Restoration Hardware, proved successful in capturing both the quiet sophistication and utter goofiness of Nate & Marisa. The red oak used for the rack bemoaned adulthood (a step up from our incessant use of pine), but the muscleman hooks screamed "wanna thumb wrestle?"

A Shaker stool

After a visit to Kentucky and the gift shop at the Shaker Museum at South Union, I developed a fondness for the shaker foot stool. Though I lacked practical need for a foot stool, I wrestled with the decision of buying one. After a careful looksee, Nate took inventory of the stool's components and filed it away in his brain. I didn't purchase the stool, but we did leave with a book about how to build Shaker Furniture, called How to Build Shaker Furniture.

For my 24th birthday, Nate surprised me with a hand-made shaker foot stool. (This is also the birthday for which he made me a dinosaur bicycle skirt--picture unavailable!)