Building Our First Built-Ins

comments (0) June 4th, 2009 in Reader's Gallery

sjdehner, member

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Our Bedroom Built-in.
In our bedroom we set a built-in next to one of the closets. Its a handy place for our reading supply. The cabinet doors are made from edge-and-center bead pine and the face-framing was done using pocket-hole joinery.

Main Bathroom with Built-ins.
Alongside a built-in corner closet we built our own vanity and medicine cabinet, incorporating our first tenon joints. To build the face-frames we used a pocket-hole jig.

2nd Floor Attic Stairs with Closet
This is our first true built-in project and only the second run of stairs weve ever built (the first being the main stairs in the next photograph).
The newel post is made with pocket-hole joinery and the cap made with a Bosch 1617EVS tabled router.

Pocket-Hole Newel Post
Taking instruction from Gary Striegler in finishing our first stairs, we employed his pocket-hole teachings to build a sturdy newel post.
The post cap was made on a Bosch 1617EVS router set in a table.
And we hand milled each baluster from local pine on a Bosch 4100 table saw.

Our Passive-Solar Maine House!
For those curious to see a little more, including our built-in kitchen, theres a link to more photographs at Fine Homebuilding online (please see the main section of this entry).

Our Bedroom Built-in.

In our bedroom we set a built-in next to one of the closets. It's a handy place for our reading supply. The cabinet doors are made from edge-and-center bead pine and the face-framing was done using pocket-hole joinery.

Photo: Jamie & Shawn Dehner

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We are in our thirties and just recently finished building our first house. Having moved from Washington state to a small town along the Maine coast we worked to build a house that settled comfortably into the surrounding architecture.

To that end - and with little experience - we decided to hand build as much of the house as possible, and that included designing some built-in furniture.

All of our built-in projects are made of solid wood without the use of any engineered products, plywood included. Using wood alone was a good challenge and added an authentic "touch-and-feel" to the house.

The result is a modern stick-framed, superinsulated (spray-foam) energy-efficient house with classic New England farmhouse character inside and out.

Our project has been an absolute joy and a priceless learning experience!

Design or Plan used: My own design - You can click here to see our built-in kitchen at Fine Hombuilding...