Well, I finally finished the cabinet I’ve been working on for the last while. I’m pretty happy with it, but everything would have been much easier (and much, much quicker) with a shop. The entire thing was built with hand tools on my dining room table.

It’s all baltic birch plywood, with full extension drawer slides. The handles are bent into the drawer fronts – the bottom left corner is bent out about an inch. It turns out that this is pretty easy to grab, and doesn’t catch much dust.

The cabinet is designed to fit in a specific space, so the dimensions were set ahead of time. The goal of the design is to be clean and modern, with a natural, organic presentation. The drawer fronts are reminiscent of bark peeling off a tree. Before I put the drawers in, the cabinet looked more futuristic or pod-like than I had envisioned, so I was a little bit worried. After seeing the final product, I think the flatness of the fronts, along with the bent detail balance out the cabinet, and together they create a pretty nice effect.