It all starts with a big pile of trash…

This was one of my favourite projects of the last few years, for a many reasons. Mainly because this shoe rack/side board/storage unit/whatever you want to call it is made up of parts of five different pieces of furniture and includes six, if not more, different species of wood. The sides were taken from on old Edwardian wardrobe, the drawers from two separate discarded chests of drawers, while the shoe rack bottoms were from two different dressers. The wood used included pine, oak, mahogany, sapele and iroko, as well as one that I’m not sure of on the front of the large drawer.

As is often the case, the idea started with a big pile of trash. I found the big drawer in a skip and the smaller ones by the side of the road, the other pieces were taken from old wardrobes from various sources.

I’ve always been better at visualising an idea than I am at drawing it, so quite often I’ll ditch the sketch book and draw it in my mind, and staring at a stack of of mismatched, odd bits of wood with almost zero coherence is usually a good starting point. So the first step here was to balance a load of things on top of each other like a house of brown cards and imagine the overall shape.

Next was trimming everything to size, getting the widths all to match the main drawer and making things look almost slightly like a piece of furniture. Sanding the white paint off the drawers revealed some nice grain beneath. I tried out using some dark stained scaffold boards as a top to get a feel for what a thick surface would feel like, to contrast the slimmer pieces elsewhere. I couldn’t decide, but a dry assembly really helped bring the idea slightly more to life, and I tweaked the smaller details like the drawer layout and the upright supports, moving them until they looked right.

Next there was a lot of sanding. The grain on the sides was unimaginably beautiful, with its light brown/orange tint. I fixed pine veneers to the front edges of the sides to conceal how the original dresser doors were build (not from one solid pieces of wood). I used an old reclaimed chunk of iroko to cut up into four feet to create a slim shadow gap along the bottom edge.

I made a very simple pine frame out of old rips of scaffold boards to separate the two drawer levels and to give the smaller drawers something to run on. After some over-eager sanding I realised that the nice grain on the front of the small drawers was actually an incredibly thin veneer, which I sanded right through, revealing the drawer fronts to be made from MDF. This piece was going to be too nice for MDF so the fronts had to go.

I replaced the drawer fronts using some old sapele floor boards I found in a skip on Steade Road, and built a final, tiny drawer out of the same boards, to fit nicely in the middle. The grain on those floor boards was mesmerising (and I still have plenty more of them). I fixed three scaffold boards together along the long edges before raising the grain and smoothing the whole surface. This was to be the new top.

I decided to go with holes for handles, rather than fix anything to the lovely surfaces. For some reason I just felt like rectangular holes were the way to go for this one so I took a chance, cut out some slotted holes, and it paid off.

I had to use a variety of stains, waxes and oils to bring all of the different woods together, attempting to get the lower, darker pieces to look the same colour, despite being completely different when I salvaged them. I wanted these pieces to be darker, so the weight felt like it was at the bottom, but I still wanted them to have some of those orange tones that are visible elsewhere, for overall coherence. The sapele drawers took a clear wax to add some shine but not darken them any further and I used a combination of ‘oak’ and ‘dark oak’ stains on the pale pine to create an aged effect. I then finished it off by rubbing all the un-waxed surfaces down with a slightly tinted Danish oil and this really tied all the surfaces together.

I briefly toyed with the idea of a slimmer top, using another wardrobe door with a beautiful grain pattern, but I decided against it.

Finally I stained the pale pine top with a combination of ‘dark oak’ with a hint of ‘Spanish Mahogany’ just to give it a slight hint of those reddy-orange tones.

This project felt like upcycling in its purest form. A true amalgamation of an unlikely gang, of what would likely have soon become a burnt or rotten pile of sludge-wood, aligned in a way that makes them look like they were born to be together. And I was most happy with the result.

If I remember correctly this one went up to a lovely house in Edinburgh, where I hope it lives a long life