Pretty in Pink {Pottery Barn inspired} Bedside table post 3

I hate waiting for glue to dry!!!  The bedside table is assembled, but it is upside down and clamped all over the place, so I can’t see the end result for another 7 hours and 20 minutes–and even then I might wait until tomorrow morning.  The glue is in there pretty far and the stability of the table depends on the glue that is drying right now.  But I’m getting ahead of myself…

First I built the drawers.  These are very small drawers, so nothing heavy is really going to be able to fit in here.  I put them together with nails and glue.

Once the drawer is assembled, take a finish sander to it and round off the edges and smooth the tops. Make sure the bottom is smooth as well--it will glide on the wood glides.

Bottom is 1/4 ply, glued and nailed in. You want to make sure your nails embed though--this is what rides on the wood glides.

And here are the wood glides–scrap 3/4 ply that I sanded on the tops for a smooth glide operation.

Glides are even with the front dividers. I drew a line on the sides for both glides, glued and nailed from the side. Then I checked for square and nailed into the front divider and through the back.

And because I save everything, I had on hand an old candle that I used to make the glide operation even smoother.  I waxed the wood glide surface and the bottom of the drawers where they have contact with the glides.  It made a difference!

Now I am adding a decorative feature to the legs I had to cut off so that it didn’t look like I just chopped the leg and then glued it on the table.  I wanted to try to match the part directly below the end so it looked like a natural part of the leg.  To get the smoothest look doing this, I probably should have attempted the router with a chamfer bit.  But I didn’t want to risk it tearing out since there is quite a bit of grain going on in these legs.  And such a tiny area to work with!  Call me cheap, but I didn’t want to have to buy more legs either.

1) Leg cut at 17 1/2 inches.  2)  Mark a line 1/8 inch down from end.  3) Miter saw adjusted to a 45 degree bevel (blade leaned to the side to the 45 degree mark).  Start blade at your pencil mark and work slowly around the leg.  4)  Sand smooth with a finish sander and 220 grit sandpaper!

How hard is it to make the drawer fill the entire space inside???  Apparently too hard for me.  I didn’t use the cabinet to measure, I used my drawing and didn’t factor in things like the front face being 1.5″ instead of the 3/4″ I’ve used in the past, and not remembering that the drawers are 1/2″ ply instead of 3/4″…so I needed some stops at the back of the drawer glides to stop the drawer from going in too far.  I used scrap ply and 18 gauge nails.

Big bummer!  Couldn’t attach the top with pocket hole screws because of the drawer glides being in the way.  I did use 3 on the back to hold it in place in order to turn it right side up and then use 2″ finish nails in a few spots.

And now for a snaa–aag.  How to attach the legs??  I hadn’t really thought this through when I began.  I think I was hoping that Waddell, the leg manufacturers, would have some nifty thing I could buy to make this easy.  And they do, but it is quite visible and wouldn’t work for this application.  And I cut off the part that you use to attach.  So I bought some of these to replace the ones I cut off.

These screws have the screw parts on each end, thus allowing you to put one end in the leg and the other you use to attach to the table top.  When I went to do this, I found out that My Man’s drill bit set is missing the size I need.  We don’t live TOO far from Home Depot, but it’s not my favorite thing to make a “quick run into town”.  So my mind cogs were a spinning and I remembered that some people use dowels to connect parts.  So I tried it.

If I had been thinking ahead, I would have marked the center of these things BEFORE I sawed off the nice, even edge.  Now I’m just guessing.  I think my guesses were pretty good, but the stinking drill bit would slide off center.  Self-centering bits would be great here, but I don’t own any.

It does matter if these legs are centered on the cabinet, and since I was eye-balling the centering on the legs, I had to get fancy with where the hole went on the cabinet part.  I used this trick before to get the right placement for an outlet in a built in.  It worked brilliantly for this as well:

1) Lipstick it really well. 2) Center it and press hard to transfer the lipstick.

You can see that the hole isn’t in the center.  Surprise, surprise.  I made sure I wiped off the lipstick on both parts and then sanded it.  I wanted to make sure the wood glue adhered well.  DISCLAIMER!!  I don’t know if this was a wise move or not–I need that glue to adhere and I might have jeopardized that with the lipstick!  But I also really needed the legs to be centered, so I chanced it.

Wood glue in both holes, insert the dowel, and push the leg even with the cabinet.

You can see the various professionally endorsed <cough, choke> methods of ensuring your legs are straight up and down.  Eye ball it and use string and clamps to maneuver it to perfection.  I did pull out the tape measure to make sure each leg was the same distance from the other.  They were, first shot!

I really, really hope the legs work this way.  If they don’t, I figure I can attempt the two-ended screws with the correct drill bit.  I did worry about how I can accurately put those in so the legs are straight up and down.  Now I’m putting the cart before the horse!  Now is not the time to worry about that.

Normally at this point in the blogging process, I know what the project ended up looking like.  Not this time!