Sunday, July 10, 2011

Pine Bedroom Built-in - Part I

I'm starting a new project for a friend - building a built-in dresser - book shelf and window seat unit out of southern yellow pine. I've been procrastinating a bit on starting this project but yesterday I started to dig into it more seriously. I went out and remeasured a few things in the room to make sure I had clear in my head the gotchas before I started modelling it.

There are a few pain points - the corner this will be sitting in is not square - at 22" depth it is already a 1/2" out of square > 90 degrees. On the same side, there is a window that will be just in front of the unit - sitting maybe 3" in front of the unit and the sill protrudes 2-5/8" into the room from the wall. I almost missed that little point. I had the unit all drawn up with a 1-1/2" face frame and then I remembered the sill. A quick call confirmed my worst fears. I had to change the left most stile of the face frame would have to increase from 1-1/2" to 3-1/8" (2-5/8" + 3/8" (draw front overlap) + 1/8" clearance).

I finished modeling the bottom - dresser unit. The two missing drawers is a design decision by my friend. There is an electrical outlet and a phone jack behind the center spot. She didn't want to block access to either of these. So instead of drawers there are two fixed shelves.

Here is the initial rendering showing the bottom dresser unit. The white block on top is a set of shelves that extend up to the ceiling. The block size is  a bit too wide at the moment. The block to the right is where the window seat will be. There is another window that will butt up tight to the right side of the dresser unit. So we are working around two windows, the one on the right along the back wall and one on the left wall just in front of the dresser unit.


I will see about modelling the other two units tomorrow. The shelf unit above should be easy, the window seat has the potential to be a bit more problematic. There is a base board heater that will sit directly in front of the window seat part. I can't build directly above it because of heat. But I'm concerned that someone sitting or laying on the window seat will constantly bash their heals against it. I'm thinking that I might try modelling it with the actual seat part at the very top extenting out about 3 inches so that it forces the knee and legs ought from the heater. But I don't know if I can get that to work or look decent.

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