After finishing building the PI office, I began to work on
making furniture for it. I started out
by making the occasional table and bookcase.
As I mentioned in the previous post about this project, the office had
to be scaled down to fit the room box I was using. Therefore, the furniture would need to be
scaled down as well. I made patterns for
the various pieces of furniture using the measurements provided in the
instructions to see what wouldn’t fit or would need to be scaled down a bit.
No measurements were given for the bookcase, so I just came
up with my own measurements and then wound up using instead measurements from a
miniature bookcase that’s in one of my other houses to make the pattern.
The pattern for the occasional table turned out to be too
large for the office and so was extensively cut down to a smaller size. The file cabinet remained the same size, but
the loveseat and desk that I planned to make was changed to a chair and much
smaller desk due to space constraints.
Making the bookcase and occasional table was fairly simple after making the necessary changes to the sizes of the items. I decided to not follow the article’s instructions and held off on painting the pieces until after construction was complete. This worked out fine and I found it easier to paint an unfinished piece of furniture as opposed to tiny pieces of wood or thick cardboard. I did find the choice of the paint color to be a bit odd and I’m still not sure if the article’s author intended for the pieces to have an olive greenish tint to them, but that’s the color I got when I mixed some black acrylic paint with the raw sienna and gel medium together. It seemed to be an odd choice, but perhaps the author wanted a bit of contrast from the wood grain finish of the office walls. To my eye it seems as though just another shade of brown would’ve been fine, but perhaps the author wanted something a bit more extreme and to give more of an impression of an aged appearance to the office.
Since I still wasn’t sure how small I wanted to make the
desk and chair, I held off on constructing these and focused on making the file
cabinet next. I decided to paint the
pieces and then glue them together first per the instructions, since I was a
bit intimidated by making this piece.
The instructions and diagrams seemed pretty extensive at first glance,
so it seemed important to follow them closely.
My first mistake was deciding to use metallic silver paint instead of
just a regular gray spray paint or acrylic paint. I found soon after that the paint was too
bright and intense for a file cabinet and tried to remedy it by mixing black
and a light gray paint together to get the desired shade. This didn’t work out either and wound up
looking a bit streaky in places, so I decided I needed to get some gray spray
paint or at least a darker gray acrylic paint.
In the end, I never found any gray spray paint that met my
specifications and settled for a darker gray acrylic paint.
The instructions for the file cabinet I found were less than
desirable and sections of them seemed to have been edited out from the
article. I don’t feel this is the
author’s fault and more that of whoever edited the author’s submitted
article. First the instructions give the
measurements for the front, sides, bottom, top, and back of the file cabinet
and then tell you to cut these out and paint them and then glue some of them
together. Then it talks about scoring
lines in the front piece to indicate where the drawers are and then to cut through
some of the layers of the board in the narrow areas between the cuts and peel
off a couple of layers to form the recessed drawer spacers.
Since the front piece was already been painted along with
the other pieces this narrow leaves white areas where the layers of board have
been peeled away and no where else in the instructions does it say to paint
over these areas. I wound up painting
the white areas because they looked pretty unsightly. Then after gluing the front pieces to the
partially constructed file cabinet it talks about cutting out pieces to make
the open drawer of the cabinet. It
seemed strange to me to present cutting pieces for the drawer at this stage in
the instructions, when they could’ve been included when giving the measurements
for the other file cabinet pieces and been asked to set them aside once they’d
been painted. The instructions also
never mention painting these pieces, but it seemed logical to me so I painted
them. Again, this isn’t the author’s
fault, but seems to be something that should’ve been realized while editing the
piece for publication.
After the drawer is glued together and painted, I slid it in
the opening even though there was nothing mentioned about this in the
instructions. I saw no need to glue it
in place, since it seemed to fit snugly.
Next on the agenda for the file cabinet was making the
drawer labels and the slots that they fit into.
The lettered labels are provided in the instructions, but all that said
about creating the slots is to cut the tabs from silver cardstock for each
drawer—no sizing information is given as to what the dimensions should be. At first I found this daunting and wasn’t
sure what I could do to “fix” my problem of trying to figure out how large to
make them when it occurred to me to glue the drawer labels to the silver
cardstock and then once the glue dried cut out the tabs with the labels
centered on the silver cardstock. The
trick seemed to be to cut so that a silver edge was evenly around the labels. Because again the instructions failed me, I
used the picture in the article to glue the labels in what I believed to be the
right place on the file drawers.
I used heavy duty staples to make the handles, per the instructions. These had the legs trimmed
and holes were poked into the drawer fronts 1/4” up from the drawer bottom and
glued in place.
Since I’ve finished creating the bookcase, occasional table,
and file cabinet, next on my list is to begin working on a desk for the office.
