A Vanity For Siri

While simultaneously building my workbench, I painted Siri's vanity that I had built earlier in the month. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of construction so I will describe some of the build details with pictures of the finished product.

The finished product with Siri's things already piling up!

I started with a 2'x4' edge glued pine board I picked up at HD. I don't have a jointer or other such tools for doing edge gluing myself so this was my only option for the top. I built a frame with 1"x6" pine which are attached to the bottom side of the edge glued board by some angle brackets. I also put in some 3/8" dowels to keep the boards flush with the sides and back of the top board. I didn't put on a front board as the drawer face acts as the front of the frame. In the corners I attached the spindle legs to the frame. I also ran a 1"x6" board on the inside of the frame to basically sandwich the legs between them and the side frame boards. This helps with stability and stiffens the entire table up a bit.

Full extension slides allow the drawer to come out all the way.
Siri won't have to reach in the back to get anything out.

I didn't get the soft close slides or self closing slides. These
work just fine.

The full extension drawer slides attach to 1"x6" boards on the inside of the frame. The drawer is made from a 1"x6" face and 1"x4" framing. The bottom is a sheet of lauan cut to size. I don't have a router and didn't have a table saw at the time (I do now!) so I wasn't able to cut dados for the bottom to fit in to. It is simply nailed to the bottom of the frame. It is not the strongest construction but it shouldn't see too heavy of use.

I used deck spindles for the legs. I did
something similar with her craft table.

I used some nice 1"x2" boards for the leg spanners. These were attached with some dowels and wood glue. I actually don't have a clamp large enough to span the width of the table so I used a ratchet strap to act as a clamp (don't judge me).

These show my lack of skill on joinery. The leg rails are slightly
inset here.

The other side's rails are nearly touching. Measure twice!

As this was the second project I built (the first was the craft table, I may post pictures later) I am quite happy with it. One shouldn't expect to turn out perfect items this early in the process. There are a few things I realized I need to improve: finishing and measuring. I didn't properly measure the inset for the dowels on the leg spanners as shown. I had some trouble with the drawer as well. I made it a bit too long the first time around so I had to trim it down to size before I glued it up, thankfully. I finished it by sanding and painting. I started with 80 grit sand paper and worked up to 220 before painting. I put down 2 coats of primer and sanded with 220 grit after each coat. I used spray lacquer paint for the finish coats. I put on 3 coats of paint and sanded with 320 grit after each coat. Lastly, I put on 2 coats of clear lacquer. I think now that I probably should have gone with a polyurethane which would have given it a harder, stronger finish. All of the sanding was done by hand but I ordered a reconditioned Rigid power sander which should help in the future. Obviously the spindle legs would have needed hand sanding due to the detail regardless but the power sander would have helped with the initial sanding and between primer coats.