Tuesday – Done!

This morning I installed the lower mirror, siliconed the corners, applied Mirror Mastic to the back and glued the plywood backer panel to the mirror and fixed the plywood to the case with 5/8” pan head screws.

After the silicone and mastic had a chance to harden up good, I stood the cabinet up. Why didn’t I install the upper mirror too? Simple; it’d be too heavy for me to lift by myself with the upper mirror in place, and I need to get the doors on and the glass cleaned up. Can’t do that with the cabinet laying in it’s face. So up it must come. I’ll enlist Marie’s help again this evening to mount the upper mirror. Again, that would not be something I could do by myself; it's too large, but with her help it will go smoothly.

I whiled away the early afternoon by cleaning up, putting away tools and working on my floor some. Then I dived into the tea chests again.

Marie decided I should make two. One to fill Bryan’s order, the other to go to Treasures. Christmas will be upon us sooner than we realize, and things like the tea chests, stopper racks and TV tables always sell briskly. It’s time to try and get a head start on it if possible. Of course our customers orders come first, but building two tea chests at once takes very little extra time – at least milling the parts does, I’ll have to put in extra time on the weekends to assemble and finish it. So I went through our collection of short lumber and brought in enough cherry for two three drawer chests, planed it smooth and to thickness and edge trimmed it.

When Marie got here we put in the top mirror, applied mirror mastic and screwed the plywood backer in place. Marie is impressed with it, she said, “It makes me want to start collecting something so I can have you build one for me.”

This completes the curio cabinet. Tomorrow I will install the shelves – temporarily – clean the glass well and try to get a workable photograph of this piece before I start wrapping it in foam, crate board and lumber.

There have been too many times where we built something beautiful and I plan to photograph it, but once I get it done I want to crate it up to protect it and I forget the photo. In each case the client said that they will send a photo of the piece in its new home, but although they each said how pleased they were with it, no one has yet supplied us with a photo to use on the web site. So I WILL get it done this time!

Doug