Furniture

At Michael Delving, we saved quite a while and finally purchased a pair of settees that are the start of a hobbit-style living room.

There is a beautiful John Howe painting of the entry of Bag End that served as an inspiration for Michael Delving.

With this painting in mind, the Mayor set about creating a bench for the Michael Delving entryway.  It was the Mayor's first foray into furniture building, so many lessons were learned over a period of about 3 months.  The material was 3/4 stock red oak (Home Depot/Lowe's/Dunn Lumber), which was joined primarily with biscuits, with just enough in the way of rabbets to give the Mayor a taste of the options available.

 Here's the first portion of the bench in the entryway.  The bench was designed to accommodate an additional panel at the end to create a visual "end" to the entryway.  There has been talk of eventually carving dwarven runes with silver leaf, but for now, a simple tung oil finish is doing the trick.

 The Mayor has moved onto the next project, which is to build a new kitchen table.  The material for this project was rough-sawn 5/4 and 8/4 cherry, which the Mayor planed and squared.  So far, the table top is the only piece that has been joined up.  Here one can see the old kitchen table being used as a work surface for the new table.  The Mayor again used biscuits to join the top, but is designing the remainder of the table using more traditional methods and tools.

For the Mayor, these woodworking projects are a delightful fulfillment of a life-long love of carpentry that began down in his grandfathers basement workshop and was fed by many evenings watching Norm Abrams on the New Yankee Workshop.