In the late 1990’s, I had already made several furniture projects including a set of pine bunk beds and an oak bookcase for my wife, so I decided it was time to get adventurous and attempt to build an all-oak dresser.
I had a few project requirements in mind when I was designing it:
- It had to be all oak – not a single piece of any other wood
- It had to be 4 drawers minimum
- The plan was to make the drawers inset but if that didn’t work I would make them outset
- The drawers had to self-close the last 1/4 of the run
- It had to be one of a kind and look old-fashioned (colonial if you will) and cool!
That was it! Now to design the dresser. First I decided the dimensions based on how big I wanted it to be. I wanted the top drawer to be chest height and the smaller of the drawers, with the bottom drawer being the deepest. This was based on my childhood dresser which I had a vague picture of in my mind.
I laid out the drawing on a sketch pad with the outside dimensions and how I wanted the drawers to look. Now I am not good at drawing so you could imagine this was not very good! But if I can do it, so can you.. don’t be afraid to try.
I then figured out how much oak I needed. The sides and top were oak plywood, the drawer fronts were real oak as well as the frame for the top, sides, and front. The back was oak hardboard.
I went to a woodworker supply house and bought all the wood, supplies, and hardware. Then I went home and cut out all the pieces. Now with only an idea of exactly what I wanted and not really much of an idea of how it would all work together, I was kind of in the mode where I just took what I could get and accepted that things weren’t necessarily going to work the way I wanted them to.
One challenge I ran into was squaring the thing up before gluing the final joints together to make the frame. Here I had all the sides put together except the last joint, and I had a HELL of a time squaring it up!!! I ended up getting a friend to help me and he held it square while I glued it and then added the clamps. I will say that without help, I was looking at an impossible task – but with his help it came out great.
After putting the carcass together, I assembled the top, the bottom, and then finally stapled the hardboard onto the back. Then I assembled the drawers, added the slider hardware, inserted the drawers (this was A LOT of work – see below) and finally added the drawer handles.
Mistakes I made:
The biggest issue I had was with the drawer slider hardware – I made what I thought were proper sized drawers, but when I went to fit them with the hardware it turned out I was just a bit on the short side. So I ended up using some filler wood to put the slider holders where they needed to be. That has been one of the biggest issues over using the dresser all of these years because if one of the lower drawers gets too full or too heavy, the slider comes apart. It’s kind of annoying.
Another issue I had was getting the sliders exactly right so the drawers would actually inset flush with the dresser front. It’s still not perfect but I did give up when it was “good enough.”
The final mistake I made (and this was rather minor in nature but still annoys me to this day) was when I was gluing the top front area together (the inset area at the very top of the dresser front) I accidentally got some glue on the wood in the front. So when I want to stain it, this part refused to stain, and I didn’t notice it until I’d already stained it. I could’ve chosen to refinish this area and then re-stained, but it was a fairly small area and not really noticeable unless you’re looking for it, and I didn’t feel for myself at least, I wanted to go through the trouble. So the lesson learned was……always know where your glue is, and is not!!!
Overall it was a terrific learning experience. I really enjoyed building this dresser and it has overall stood the test of time. And it still looks great to this day.