Milton Dresser Build - Modern Shaker Furniture Build - by Dailey Woodworks in Bryan, Texas

This is what I call the Milton

dresser

, part of our Milton collection at Daily Woodworks. This is my version of the classic

shaker

design with some

modern

elements like soft close drawers,

modern

colors and finishes, and today I will show you how to do it like this, if you want a

dresser

like this, you can go to our website and order one, the We will custom design and make it exactly how you need it, but for our fellow woodworkers and craftsmen, we have a set of plans available so you can do this at Recreationwoodworker.com. As you've seen, I've been laminating our legs together.

I didn't have much stock available so I just glued my legs together. I made it a little bigger. It ended up being about a quarter inch larger and about a half inch longer than I need my final size to be and then I just glued them all together while they dried. I started working on the front frame, we overlapped the drawers so we could do a hardware-free finish, we didn't want drawer pulls or anything like that to distract from the wood grain, so by overlapping drawers I was able to trace a groove in the faces of the drawers to act as a handle when we are assembling.

On the front frame we are using spacer blocks that are either scrap wood or the styles that separate each drawer just to make sure it is perfectly aligned for this particular project. We used red oak for the body and stained it dark black and We used white oak for the drawer faces and then we gave them a simple clear coat which will be one of our standard materials. White oak, red oak, it's a little bit cheaper, of course, and then we can do walnut, pecan, all the different woods you want. It occurs to me again: I'm using spacer blocks or just scrap wood that I cut to the exact size I need and using them to layout that way, there's no chance for mistakes on the dresser, we're going with a seven-drawer layout. it has four larger drawers and then three smaller drawers on top, this can easily be customized to be more of an entertainment center by making cubbies on top so you know your game consoles and things like that, whenever we do a stain grade project, always pre-sand everything to its final grain before assembly.

That way I can make sure I get everything there is to get and you can see me marking with pencil lines making sure I don't miss anything and then carefully sanding everything there is. Several ways we could have made our sides one way would have been using three quarter inch plywood to just screw it together and then trim it. That would have been nice, but we went with a true five-piece style and here I am routing everything. Doing that with the five-piece style allows for movement of the wood and actually saves a little weight because we can use a center panel that is lighter than a solid sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood, which would save that weight. and at the same time maintain the strength we need now I'm going to go back to my chain saw table to use my trusty chain saw.

If you've followed my channel for a while, you know that I'm a big fan of chain saws and I couldn't operate my shop as efficiently as I do without it, obviously, you know, a big fifty thousand dollar slide saw and a big warehouse would be phenomenal, but that's how I roll so I don't use quarter inch plywood in any of my projects so what I'm doing is using half inch plywood for that center panel and now I'm routing or I'm trying to create that quarter inch lug to fit in my quarter inch slot, I like the half inch because if you make something with quarter inch plywood it's going to sound very hollow like a drum and honestly, I don't like the sound of it and I like the feel of the weight and strength that half inch provides, so I do the same thing with my drawer bottoms too.

Here you can see that I'm assembling that five-piece side panel the same way you do a cabinet door. I'm using dominoes, of course, instead of making a tongue-and-groove bit because I didn't have a big router table, but now I do. great router table so I'm going to start doing that because it's faster strength wise or just as good just this takes a little more time with the dominoes so after putting it back together I pre-sanded everything and clamped it to my panel clamp and just moved on to the next step which is finishing our legs so the first thing I had to do was separate them and now I'm using my 30's hand plane to get the glue out and get it everything is uniform on essentially two sides. to be able to take it to the table saw and cut it to its final size using a hand planer is always fun, I really enjoy it, so again I cut them down, made them about a quarter of an inch bigger, so I'm just shaving. each side making sure it's nice and square and then I have my two inch square legs, once I cut them to size I then clamp them all together and sand them all together, this makes sure everything is consistent that way, I remove all the saw marks.

It leaves everything smooth and that way I keep sharp edges because I have enough material for my sander to rest on now that we're ready for assembly and again I'm using my festival dominoes here as well. You could do this a couple of different ways. ways you could do this with biscuits if you have a biscuit joiner you could even drill a pilot hole through the face frame with a countersink bit and then just drive a wood screw from the face frame into the leg to do what you need do. but I like the mortise and tenon strength that a domino gives you, so that's what I'm doing here, making sure to use plenty of glue to line everything up and then grind everything down.

I didn't count how many dominoes I used in this project. I'm sure someone could extrapolate the math if interested based on the video. I don't know, I'm not analytical enough to count every domino. It would be great to know how many got into this, but you know whatever, make sure. I get all the glue out quickly and in a hurry because the glue and dye don't mix well. I think this project was the closest I've ever come to using all the clamps I had, so once everything had enough time to dry, I let it all loose. and now I'm going to start assembling our side panels because now they're dry as well and then that was again, just making sure that I've placed everything correctly, like that 3 8 inch and a quarter inch reveal creates a nice little line of shade. and it just works great with this style of

furniture

.

Nice, simple, clean but pleasing to the eye. Whenever I do domino work like this, I like to use the tight setting on one piece and then the looser setting or medium setting on the other piece. this allows me a little bit of adjustment while I'm assembling that way, if I didn't get my goal perfectly, I have a little wiggle room to dial in the adjustment that way, I'm getting it as perfect as possible during assembly and that way there's less sanding to do less touch ups to do less oh shit how am I going to fix this kind of thing and just take my time to make sure I'm getting that design right from the start.

It doesn't always happen, but this project overall turned out pretty well. Here's a closeup of that assembly. It can be seen. Okay, now I'm putting all the glue in there and now we're going to put it together. I went ahead and milled. I raise the back leg too so I can grab it and hold it in one go. Gravity is working with me so that helps and now we're just going to hold it down and then I always use these little square blocks to help me assemble. and this is just to make sure that everything dries properly, if you can make that happen, this will make everything easier and again check that the glue comes out, making sure that you have all that taken care of now on the back, I'm taking out a rabbit to my plywood back, I'm using a half inch plywood back to give it strength and then it allows me to mount something to mount the little slats for the bottom mount drawer slides to mount on and this is just a stretcher which I'm installing and then cut the plywood to go on the back.

I decided not to make a solid bottom on this one because it's not necessary and two would have simply added more weight. You know, this is a piece of

furniture

that's going to be moving around with my clients, so having where it's not a billion pounds just makes sense and again, it's not necessary in this, so just having that stretcher there to make sure that everything is held to the proper distance and now we're going to cut the back to put it back there using that. half inch plywood because it gives me the strength that I need or want and this reinforces all this makes sure everything is square and then I'm just making it fit really tight and then I'm going to glue it and staple it once the back is glued and stabilized on this piece, the body of this piece is essentially done, I add a few more spacer blocks and slats here and there, I make one in the center, if you look closely you can see it's a little sunken in the middle, but it's a Bit hard to see with the way my lens is set up so I just add a little block of wood in there and make sure it's tight on each side so I don't spread it too much or underspray because that will affect it.

Squaring up our drawers later and now we are ready to lift it up and move on to the next step and that is making the top. I prepare my

build

s because again I don't have a big workshop, so the bodywork was already done. It meant all my clamps were free again so now I can glue the top once the top is glued I can then move on to the next process. My tops are simple. I cut my boards about an inch longer than I need, since I tear them up and put them together, make sure it's about a half inch wider than I need, and then cut it down to size when I

build

my table tops again.

I'm using my Festool dominoes to get those that would serve as reinforcement and two that make sure all my boards stay nice and flat that way, there's less sanding needed, so my daughters were, I think they were going swimming that day, if not I remember wrongly, I also designed this piece in Sketchup as I do with all my furniture. but since it was my first time doing it, I also wanted to double check that everything translated correctly from Sketchup to reality because sometimes you have to modify some things because it just doesn't work the way you thought and that's her little poodle um, she's sweet and he likes to hang out with me whenever everyone inside goes somewhere and he does very well in the store and he is a very, very good dog.

I have a whole playlist on festival dominoes how to use it how to use the different accessories and how I do different things with it, it really is one of my most used tools and it really allows me to do what I do with the level of quality that I want to produce things like that quickly and efficiently, so it's worth using. It works for tons of things and here's just one more example of that. Our drawer fronts are a five piece drawer front um and the same thing I did with those five piece side panels earlier as I'm tearing everything down to size I'm measuring four times um for half inch overlapping drawers you need Make sure your drawer front is an inch taller and an inch wider, so make sure you subtract and know the width of your rails and styles by adding it all up, so when you make this cut, check the measurement. batch cut never batch cut without double checking at least your first cut to make sure everything is ok again ask me how i know because i have done it before where i made tons of drawer fronts or made a whole series of drawers. wrong size because I didn't check the first one, so once I checked it, you can see I'm grouping everything together and then I'm just going to run my rhythm, build them with Festool dominoes again now that I have my super nice one. router table I can use a rail and a style bit, um, but right now I'm still using my table saw, one that I still have.

It's always good to have more than one router table and now the same as before, especially with the grade of stain. I want to sand everything before assembly because if you're missing something it's going to be very difficult to get to it now if you're painting, that's not as critical because if you paint a spot and it's rough or it doesn't look right it just smears. sand and then touch up, but if your stain looks stained, then your stain just looks stained, so again I'm checking my design four times, making sure I label everything and then I'll be ready to start routing my mortises. ramon's domino pierValdez.

I again made a video about this on my vestal dominoes playlist. Great accessory, makes milling small parts like this much faster. You can see that I have a block of wood there to act as a kind of makeshift guard for safety and to make sure you know that my hands are well out of the way to keep everything in place as it should be. I believe they have partnered with Seneca Woodworking and now they make a fixture that does what I am doing. With my wooden blocks and spring clamps I need to look at that and get it.

I'm sure it's worth it and mark all the pieces again so you know what goes where you can't mark too much on something that is sanded so just mark. So I'm making sure that everything is lined up the way it needs to be now for our floating panel on these five piece drawers. I chose solid white oak and made sure that when doing this with my drawers, I kept the grain lines continuous. I don't know if you can see it very well in the picture, but if you look closely you'll see that the grain simply carries over from one drawer front to the next again.

I left it about half an inch thick and then took it out. that slot to hold the panel, this is a little finished like I'm doing on the front of the drawer so that that way you don't have to know that when you route it you pass the slot all the way and so you have it exposed. joint so that yourFill it in with the dominoes and again just a nice little visual detail. I like these little visual details of exposed woodwork. Some people don't like them and that's okay, it's completely personal preference, but that's what I like, so that's what I do now.

I'm making a ribbon for the top and you can see I'm just marking. I have to make a notch on that. I made sure this block was square again. This helps keep the project square and then it just attaches with wood glue and pocket screws now to attach the top you don't have to go and do like the fancy z clips and all these different things. What I do is drill a large hole and use a washer head screw, which allows for the wood movement you want. I need to stain, this was done with minwax true black stain.

I have a video on how to properly sand your projects and through trial and error I found that I don't really need to go above 120 grit when I'm sanding and stuff. it makes sure that my tint actually sets very well and I get nice, darker, richer colors, sorry for the vertical footage. I think I put this on my Instagram page after I was done, so I dyed it with the minwax, the true black dye, and the red. The oak gave it this nice little reddish brown hue that I really liked and was very happy with these drawers.

They are solid maple and made with exposed domino joints for appearance and then we made those undermount drawer slides that are attached to the back panel. and it's very easy to do here I'm marking where I'm going to mount my drawer fronts and be very careful because my rails and styles were quite narrow on this so I had to make sure my screw didn't go in the wrong place. and it didn't make it past my front panel and luckily I missed all that so no remake had to happen. You can also see that cove I made for our drawer pulls, which worked great and here is our finished piece, I called it that.

milton

collection in honor of my grandfather because it has that classic

shaker

look, it's simple, it's sturdy, it will last a long time and it's nice not to look anything flashy or ornamental, these are nightstands that I made to go with this and that video will be the The next one I will be launching and I will also have a number of plans for them.

Thanks for watching this episode of Daily Woodworks and we'll see you next time.