Sunday, April 15, 2007

Jessica's Bedroom Set

One of our recent projects has been a combination of refinishing an old bedroom set and adding to it with some woodworking projects. Daughter Jessica is graduating from Johnson & Wales University in May, and she has accepted a position with J. Alexander's in Nashville. So, she will need to outfit an apartment soon.

This old bedroom set of Kathie's was a little tired and it lacked a footboard for the bed and had no bedside nightstands. So, we stripped the finish from the old pieces (with one exception) and built the missing pieces from walnut. (The one exception is a chest of drawers that Jessica has in Providence. We intend to refinish it to match when we transport the new items to Nashville and meet Jessica there.) We succeeded in getting stains and varnishes on all of the pieces to match quite well.

Knowing that Jessica would want to see the finished product, and thinking that others of you would be interested as well, we present our results here. First, here is the original bed headboard and the new footboard we made to match it. In the process, we converted this to a queen size bed with sturdy side rails and cross braces.


Next, we built two bedside nightstands as you will see below. We tried to make them match the original furniture style as closely as possible.


Finally, here is the dresser and mirror, along with a closeup of the lower portion. I have no idea how the camera managed to capture the image in the mirror!!