I’m not sure exactly when I originally made this project. It was sometime when I was living in Wicker Park. What makes it hard to pin down is that I didn’t have it when I moved in, I did have it when I moved out, and somehow built it in Grayslake. Must have gone home and built it on weekends or something. One of the original construction pictures I have says that it was taken in February 2016. We’ll go with that.

At the beginnning of 2019 we had been living in our house for just under 2 years. The storage situation in our master bedroom had been irritating us for while, and I started thinking of building a proper dresser. I wanted to build a dresser that would last at least my whole life, and which would never go out of style, so I choose to build it out of solid walnut, using traditional joinery everywhere except the drawer slides.

Leading up to this project, I had been working more with different types of joinery, and was starting to feel comfortable with executing the key joints (mortise and tenons, dovetails, lap, finger, bridal, etc.) using the equipment in my shop. Still, a dresser would have more pieces and different types of joints than anything I had done up to that point.

I built a walnut mantle for my parents house in Madison wisconsin.

Picked up a bargain load of ~200 boardfeet of walnut from out in rural Illinois.

This was just my third woodworking project I attempted. Designed to be simple, both visually and to construct, with an emphasis on a two-tone color scheme. Built in my parents Grayslake house using a pretty crappy setup as described in Platform Bed.