Friday, September 17, 2010

Snack Tables

These are some snack/painting tables that I built for my son Luke's school. The top is plywood with birch veneer with solid birch around the edges, everything else is solid birch. They are oiled and coated with polyurathane. I lucked out on the tops- there is some really interesting grain. Luke was really disappointed that I didn't paint these bright colors, like the old tables that they replaced (as a side note, I'm pretty sure that the old tables were there when I went to this preschool). His teacher was thrilled though, and she bought clear table cloths so that the grain could be seen while the kids eat their snacks.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

More Storage Beds

For some reason, I've built a lot of beds, and specifically storage beds, over the past year. Maybe it's because there were no queen beds in the hey day of the danish modern movement. Maybe it's because that's what I started selling in the first place. Maybe it's because an expanding cost of living means more people are living in smaller homes and more in need of storage under their beds. Either way, here are a couple more that I've built over the past few months.
This bed was built for Mimi and Susan, who live in Oakland. They saw a bed like this one on Lush Pad (www.lushpad.com) and asked me to build one in a full, since their place is quite small. I didn't want to deal with shipping a bed to Oakland and they didn't want to deal with the shipping price, but then a free trip to Northern California thanks to my appearance on the Wheel of Fortune paved the way for a delivery stop in Oakland. This is the first time I used a dovetail joint on the drawers, and it turned out pretty stunning- this is undoubtedly the wave of the Pete Deeble future.
I built this bed for Nathan and his wife Mary, who heard about me from someone who had bought a bed off me about a year ago. This is nothing new design-wise but did feature some incredible, striking wood grain. Specifically, the headboard had the most captivating grain movement of any headboard I've used yet (sadly, I did not take a close-up), and the drawer on the right night stand (pictured above) had a great natural hole. Nathan and Mary use a very high mattress, so that influenced the final look in a different, cool way.