233 Wine Credenza Design

The last piece of the living room is a sideboard / credenza / wine rack to hold our various glasses, placemats, and show off the wine collection. This is a first concept, but the idea is a walnut slab with the legs mitered from the same piece as the top, and the live edge running up the sides and across the front.

233 Dining Table

New apartment, new furniture set. I set out to build a dining room table, bench seat, and coffee table for starters. To guide the design language, I decided to use Jen's TV table as a starting point... now it's our bar:



The table is 101" x 42", built from solid walnut with lots of knots. Here it is under construction:



Finished:



Dinner party time!

Truck Tailgate Bench

After a nice afternoon kiting in the Delta, I was sitting on my tailgate checking out people surfing, and decided wanted a more comfortable seat for this type of scene. Here is a photo from that afternoon:



In typical fashion, I got carried away and built a teak bench for the tailgate...

Along with a flagpole and some custom cushions...




This is going to be EPIC for Stanford football games.

Sandy Patio Set

I always looked at the trapezoidal alcove on our patio and imagined a big table there. After giving it some more thought, I divided it into two tables to make it easier to fit in the basement in the winter, and to make access easier to the center inside seats.

Built from solid Cedar. Many fun meals to come!

1991 Ford F350

Ever since I started doing carpentry, I have wanted a truck. Actually I wanted one even before that, but this gives me a good excuse.

So now I am the proud owner of a 1991 Ford F350 XLT Lariat, single cab full bed, with the 7.5L engine. 400 ft*lbs of torque... and plenty of towing capacity to move a boat around. (Someday.)

Sandy Way Dartboard Frame

My family's place at Squaw used to have a terrible dartboard over the fireplace upstairs -- it was worn down, at the wrong height, in one of those bar-style mini-cabinets with doors.

I finally got around to tearing that down and replacing it with a new board from New Zealand company DMI darts. It plays really well, and has a super skinny "spider" (metal frame that divides the scoring regions). Highly recommended.

The frame is made of vertical-grain Douglas Fir, with a water based dark brown stain. The carved letters are the natural color of the fir.

The chalkboard is genuine slate that used to hang in a San Francisco School District classroom. I found it at a spot in SF called Andreas Stone & Marble, some old Italian guys who took down a bunch of schoolroom chalkboards and put in new white boards around the city. I like the thought that generations of people (many older than me) learned from that stone.

More importantly, this project nearly used up the enormous trove of wine corks that people have been giving me for the past few years (since I started making trivets). Not sure how many are there in total ... maybe sometime we're snowed in with a blizzard we can count them.

I used the same method I used on the dartboard in my SF pad ... scroll down to see that one.

Sutro Tower coat rack

Aliph's walls are cast concrete, making it tough to hang things like coat hooks on the wall. After a few months of setting my clothing and backpack down on a crowded desk or distant floor, I decided some kind of standing or leaning coat rack was in order.

I ended up using a structural column to locate the lean-to, which is made of solid padauk:



The edges are routed with a sine / radio wave design and the graphic was carved from a vertically stretched photo of the Sutro Tower, the 762-foot antenna that stands atop central San Francisco:

1919 living room set

The front room at my house used to be the TV room. At some point Noble and I cooked up a scheme to redesign the "bar room" as the living room, and turn the front room into an office / sitting room.

I built two desks out of Red Oak with a thin stripe of American Walnut trim:



The window desk:



The wall desk:



Then we hooked up the sitting area with a coffee table and matching end table. The end table houses electronic components that drive a projector for big screen action.

The end table has the material scheme flipped -- walnut with red oak trim:



Same with the coffee table:



Projector ledge:



Projection:



The coup de grace was the idea to hang the projector over a mirror. This way people sitting across the coffee table from the projector can still see the TV image in the mirror:



Of course, all the text is inverted ... what can ya do?

Jen's TV stand / wine rack

For her birthday, I built my beautiful girlfriend a stand for her TV. I decided to integrate a wine rack, since she has a pretty nice collection of wine ... she has been studying for the bar, so I thought this piece would tie together two nice distractions from the 16-hour-a-day routine.

The semi-octagonal shape is based on a smaller coffee table that Jen got from her family. Construction is solid American Walnut. It holds dozens of DVDs / VHS tapes (yes Jen has some choice movies on tape), 18 bottles of wine, a big TV, cable box, and a combo VHS/DVD player.



Happy birthday, baby!

Jeff and Heather's wedding present

For the wedding of Jeff Condon and Heather Porter, I decided to build the happy couple a piece of furniture. After some consideration they chose a coffee table. The concept was all Jeff: he wanted the table top to be made of broken down wine boxes, which he provided, including the illustrious Opus One.



My mom completed the present by buying them a bottle of the famous Napa Valley vintage.



Mazel Tov!

Ski tracks coffee table

The dining room table needed a little brother. Partially thanks to leftover material, and partially thanks to renewed inspiration I decided to build a coffee table to match the piece in the dining room.



The material scheme is inverted, meaning the top is solid teak with an inlay of twin red oak stripes. The piece in between is a darker piece of teak.



The ski tracks were modeled in Pro/E, 3D printed as templates, and cut on a router.



This was the most challenging thing I have ever built, primarily because that shape requires the router cut across the grain, on both sides of a narrow piece ... it loves to grab and shred your part. I had to cut 6 red oak pieces before I got these two.

1919 Dartboard

After watching our 1880s-vintage drywall get chewed up by dozens of wayward dart strikes, I decided to do something. After making a few trivets, the cork collection had been steadily growing, and I did a little math and realized that I could surround both our dartboard and a miniature white board I picked up at Office Depot.



Fun house rule: if you hit a cork, you have to take a shot (usually, whiskey).

Joseph Bagley memorial frame

My good friend Andrew Bagley's grandfather, Joseph Sr., was a war hero. A B25 pilot at the age of 23, he was was shot down over the Yellow Sea while attacking Japanese warships in February of 1945. He never met his newborn son, Joe Jr.

He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and Silver Star. Along with an old sepia photo, these medals were all that Joe's family had to commemorate their father.

For Joe Jr.'s birthday, Andrew commissioned me to build a frame for these precious keepsakes.



The frame is American Eastern Black Walnut, with a velvet backing board. I was very honored to help him with this present. And can't you see the resemblance?

JiC Palace of Fine Arts painting frame

Jeff's painting of San Francisco had been hanging in our house for a good period of time when I thought it deserved a frame.



The construction is padauk set into red oak.








Nice work, Condy.

Rural bicyclist frame

My roommate Nick returned from Vietnam a few months ago with a really nice painting by a Vietnamese artist he met. I hooked him up with a frame made from American walnut:



The edge profile is called a Roman Ogee.

Zebrano frames

For Mother's day, I built two identical picture frames for two of the best moms in history, Carol Millie and Sherry Conrads.



The frame and base are both made from solid Zebrano. They house changeable 12" x 9" prints, this one a Sherry Conrads original.

Sandy Way TV cabinet

Work has concluded on the TV cabinet, besides the top. Two storey built-in, knotty pine ply and solid wood with an antique wax finish.



Ski movie DVD collection has found a permanent home:



Big thanks and love always to my mom, for all her hard work and vision.

Boot rack

The assorted roommates' collection of wet boots, shoes, gloves etc. have finally found a home. I built a rack from brown stained vertical-grain Douglas Fir (to match the rest of the room's color scheme).



The shelves are slanted so that the snow melt drips off them and onto a track on the bottom shelf, that diverts the puddle through a hole and into a pan under the rack. Booya.

The first and last rosewood pieces I will ever make

My buddy Jeff Condon is a terrific painter. He made me a deal, in which I make frames for two of his paintings, and in exchange I get to keep one of them. This still life is the one that he kept:



I decided to use solid Brazilian Rosewood. Unbeknownst to me, it turns out that Rosewood gives me a terrible allergic reaction. I broke out all over my body, and had a rash for over a month.



All the same, I really like how they turned out. Not that I will be using rosewood ever again.



The painting I kept was painted from a pic of Ted Conrads sailing an FJ:



Thanks Jeff!

Red Oak Bed: the beginning

The first piece I built was my bed. It originally had a head board, but I took it down when I moved to SF.



Since I built this guy I have learned so much about design and workmanship ... it's now looking really rough. When I finally buy my own place I'll design a new king.