We have quite a few artist events here and we have assembled a collection of a few dozen black folding chairs which we lug out for our guests. We have been storing them on the screened porch for easy access but they have been getting covered with dirt and pollen and getting generally nasty. Ellen and I hit upon the idea of building a chair storage unit from some of the remaining cedar we milled from our land and always wanting to kill two birds we thought we'd get that serving buffet we always wanted out there as well. Being Cassilhaus it had to, of course, be trapezoidal. We engaged our dear friend and fabulous craftsman James Baxter to assist. We knew he would be on board. We drew up a preliminary design which involved taking down a good chunk of the south wall of the porch and moving the door West by about a foot.
The clearnace under the window was precisely enough to get the chairs in and out and gave us a nice connection to the beautiful cedar top. When we milled our trees we left a few thick slabs with live edges anticipating this type of use and James took two of them and seamed them in the shop.
We also had some of the cedar siding from the house that we wanted to use for the doors and end panels and I worked on sanding and staining them while Ellen and James worked on the framing of the cabinet.
Moving the door and adjusting the wall was pretty straight forward. We removed all of the screens, cut all of the elements, and shifted everything down a foot and put it back together.
The next step was to route out a channel on the underside of the top slab to accommodate the door roller hardware.
When things got dark and stormy we moved into the carport.
We had to take a hiatus for a few weeks to get everyone's schedule aligned and then we finished up the edges, trim, and hardware on the doors and put it all together!
We decided on having a small piece of granite at the end of the buffet and its our only remaining punch list item. We want a live edge on it and our friends at Prescott Stone who did our kitchen counters are going to do it as soon as we get them a drawing.
The finished product!
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