A Make-up Vanity

[jteneyck]

Here's a project I just finished that will be installed this weekend.



It's roughly 61" W x 18" D x 27-1/12"H. The center drawer and back are connected to the two cabinets with screws, so it comes apart easily for transport and installation. The base molding sits 3/4" off the floor. I did that so I could cut the miters, glue them up and finish them prior to installation. They are screwed to the cabinets from the inside. There will be a small molding, shown at the lower left, that will be scribed to the floor on site and then the miters cut to fit. We'll see how it works out. The two cabinets will be scribed to the walls. The cabinets have leveling feet built into them to make installation easier.



The basic construction is (Lowes) maple plywood with a maple faceframe. The drawer fronts are 1/2" BB plywood with 1/2" thick maple moldings that I made with my Foley Belsaw molding machine. It's actually a door stop profile that I ripped down to 7/8" width. Similarly, I made the base molding, too, also from maple. I used the same molding as the drawer fronts for the panels in the knee well. All the moldings are glued on with a few dabs of glue and held with pin nails.

The drawer boxes are finger jointed 1/2" BB plywood with 1/4" maple plywood bottoms. The drawer slides are K&V full extension soft closing side mounted slides.



The drawers were supposed to be completely inset, but a design/construction error resulted in the top drawer hitting the nailing rail so I had to move them out a little proud of the face frame. I thought of reworking the back of the cabinet but I decided I liked the look with the drawers a little proud. I hope the owner will, too.







The drawers were finished with a coat of Sealcoat Shellac followed by two coats of GF EnduroVar. The cabinet was finished with two coats of BIN white shellac primer and then two coats of GF Enduro White Poly. I sprayed all of them with my new Qualspray pressure feed HVLP gun. Everything sprayed great and I am very impressed with the gun and the quality of the finishes.

The lighting's bad but you probably wouldn't see any defects even in great light. I filled all the pin nail holes and other small defects with autobody glaze. Great stuff if you've never used it.

Thanks for looking.

John

[Mr Eddie]

Very nice John. I'm thinking you really like your new spray setup! You have convinced me enough that I am actively looking for a new compressor - and then a call to JJ for the spray kit. A couple of questions:

1. How do you do the finger joints for the drawers?
2. Where do you spray? My shop is 24' x 24' with the workbench located dead center. I thought about a track on the ceiling so I could encircle the bench with some sort of hanging drop cloth - sort of a shower curtain type setup. I know you have a basement shop so I was curious how you setup to spray.

Thanks for the help,
Lonnie

PS You should call Jeff and ask if you can be a mfg rep for him

[jteneyck]

I cut finger joints using a jig I made for my table saw. Mostly, I make 1/2" fingers, using my dado set. Here are a couple of photos, but I can find or take more if needed. It's a pretty standard arrangement that rides in one of the miter slots but works very well. As long as I use a fresh backer board on the front of the jig for each run of drawers chipout is pretty minimal. I like finger joints because they are really easy and fast to make and I think they look good on anything but traditional furniture. There's no thinking about dimensions either; you cut the parts to full drawer width and length. I like simple.





I spray in my basement shop. I hang poly from nails in the floor joists to form a U shape about 8 feet deep and 6 feet wide. Paper on the floor. 2 sawhorses with a turntable on top to hold the work.



In the back wall of the "booth" I cut a hole for a 5" diameter plastic hose that goes to the inlet of my DC fan. I bypass the cyclone and bags and route the hose directly to the fan inlet. On the fan outlet I mount another hose and route that to a very convenient window just behind the DC. Here's a photo showing the hose in the back.



There are no filters; the over spray gets sucked into the exhaust fan and gets blown out the window. Filters just plug up so I don't use them. I've been using this arrangement for at least 3 years now and have found no build up or corrosion in the fan. The over spray is dry before it gets that far and gets blown outside as a fine powder.

The DC outputs about 1200 CFM, which means 1200 CFM of makeup air is needed. To get that much makeup air I leave the door to my shop open and open a window not far from the top of the stairs. If I don't do that, the makeup air will come down the chimney for the boiler or, even worse, it will cause my woodstove to belch smoke into the house.

I spray shellac and waterborne finishes ONLY. I would never spray volatile solvent finishes with this arrangement. But I also would not spray waterborne finishes w/o exhaust. The over spray is not healthy and goes everywhere, even with a spray booth. I sometimes spray for nearly an hour and have no over spray or odor problems with this setup, but certainly would w/o exhaust.

The booth is large enough that I can put a pretty good size piece of furniture inside it:





The whole thing takes less than 10 minutes to assemble or take down. I fold up the plastic and store it on a shelf between uses. I'm on my second piece in 5 years. I roll up the paper and get several uses out of it before tossing it.

If I sound like a spokesman for JJ it's because I'm very impressed with how well the gun sprays. I got pretty good results with my cheap gravity feed HVLP guns, but this gun sprays a much finer mist and makes it easy to get a great finish. I can even spray down into an 8" drawer w/o much trouble. EnduroVar always gave me orange peel problems in the past, but not any more. And for higher viscosity products, the pressure feed gun is the only way to go. You can use a smaller N/N and get finer atomization which results in a uniform coating that flows out easier with less chance of orange peel. I'm sure there are plenty of good spray guns out there. Jeff's advantage (to me anyway) is he's available to talk to and help you decide what you need for the products you want to spray.

Whatever gun you decide on I highly recommend the 3M PPS system. It's transparent so you can see how much finish is left in the cup. More important, you can spray at any angle, even upside down. And that goes for the gravity feed PPS system, too. The integral filter assures you won't get contamination into the gun, too.

I'm an even better spokesman for APEX ski boots. I'm pretty sure I've sold at least 6 pairs of them to people who have asked about those funny looking ski boots I'm wearing. An Australian father and son asked me about them at the top of a ski lift one day. The next day both were wearing them! With giant smiles.

John

[Steve N]

John I'll start by saying white cabinets, and furniture are usually a total turn off for me. That said I like that piece's lines enough that I would be willing bet I'll like it finished. Please post a pic or 3 when you do the install. Are you making a mirror to go with it?

[Paul K. Murphy]

Everything looks great!
I like the temporary spray booth. I'll have to make a mental note regarding auto body glaze. I've never used that before.

[jasfrank]

Awesome workmanship John. I was wondering, when you vent the overspray out your window, do you get the siding on your house coated a bit?

[Mr Eddie]

Thanks John for all of your posts. As you stated, it is very confusing to zero in on a quality setup when you are a beginner. Your notes regarding n/n, air pressures, and the actual products you are using will help me to get good results right out of the gate. Your spray booth is perfect for almost any size shop and using the dust collector is the missing part I hadn't worked out yet.

[jteneyck]

Thanks, much appreciated. I just checked the outside of the house and there is a faint whitish shadow on a few of the bricks where the hose exists the window at ground level. But it knocks right off with a broom. With the clear coats and shellac I mostly spray, I've never noticed anything on the brick, just a faint whitish powder on the ground which disappears with a good breeze or the next rain.

John

[jteneyck]

I'm happy you found the info. useful. It was all new and somewhat frustrating when I was learning (and I still am) to spray. If I can pass along some knowledge that others find helpful I'm happy to do so.

I don't know why it took me so long to think about using the fan from my DC to vent the spray booth, maybe because I've never read of anyone doing it. I find that really surprising since it works so well. I started with a small squirrel cage fan and a filter in front of it. The fan was barely adequate when the filter was fresh; after it started to blind over it became worthless. Somewhere in an effort to improve things I looked at the DC sitting right behind the spray booth and the light bulb went on. I've mentioned using it several times before but have never had anyone write back to say they tried it. All I can say is, if you have a DC where the fan is easily disconnected from the bags, it makes a great spray booth exhaust fan. Mine is a Grizzly similar to [url=http://grizzly.com/search?q=%28dust_collector_type:%28"Two-Stage+%28Cyclone%29"+OR+Cyclone+OR+Single-Stage%29%29&rankBy=price:ascending]this one.[/url] It takes all of 2 minutes to disconnect the hose from the inlet and outlet and install the one from the spray booth and the other out the window. If you had a rigid pipe system it would be easy enough to install a couple of Y's and blast gates or something similar.

John

[jteneyck]

OK Steve, here are some photos of the install. It turned out OK, but I got off to shaky start when I realized.....



... I had completely forgotten about the PVC pipe across the back corner on the right side ! I usually take photos and make very detailed sketches for built-ins; I did neither this time. Oh boy, Mr. Customer, we have two choices. I can either install the right cabinet against the pipe with a large filler on the right side, in which case I'll have to build a new center bridge and drawer, or I can cut the cabinet to fit around the pipe and build a new, shorter drawer box. Thankfully, he went with option 2.

So I cut the cabinet box to fit around the pipe.



To level the cabinets I installed 2" machine screws through T-nuts in the cross rails at the bottom of the cabinet. I cut slots in the top of the machine screws with a hacksaw so that I could adjust them with a screw driver from above.



The second photo above also shows how I installed the center panel. Biscuits locate where it sits against the two cabinets, and screws from inside each cabinet hold everything in place.

The floor ran off more than I originally thought, and I had to cut away about 1/4" of the right side of the right cabinet so that my moldings would still cover at the bottom on the left side. With that done I leveled both cabinets, making sure they were at the same height on the back wall.

To fit the back panel and bridge in place I scribed both cabinets to their respective wall, measuring carefully on where to set the scribes so that I'd end up with the correct gap between the two cabinets. With that done, I screwed the back panel in place and slid in the bridge.



After screwing the bridge in place I screwed the two cabinets to studs in the back wall. Then I cut the large bottom moldings to fit against each wall, left and right, and screwed them in place from the inside. Doing it this way there were no nail holes, etc. to deal with on the show side.



That left the bottom moldings to cut to length and scribe to the floor. I got the scribes marked before I went home for lunch so that I could cut those with the bandsaw, then adjusted and cleaned them up with a hand plane when I got back. I left them with about a 1/16" gap at the bottom for a bead of silicone caulk. I attached them to the cabinet with construction adhesive and glued the miters with super glue.





Finally, I installed some blocks on the inside of the cabinet. They sit on the floor and are screwed to the cabinet side, and provide a lot more bearing area than the little leveling screws I used for leveling the cabinets. They also won't vibrate loose over time like the leveling screws might. You should be able to see both the leveling screw and the block on the inside the cabinet in this photo.



So here's what it looks like, minus the one drawer.





The customer only asked me to build the vanity, but before I was even done he started talking about having me make a matching mirror frame above it, another frame for a picture to cover over the electrical panel on the right wall, and a towel cabinet between the sink and commode. That would be nice as I still have more than 1/2 gallon of the white poly I used for the cabinet.

As nearly always, it took longer to do the install than I planned, about 5 hours vs. the 3 I had estimated. But it came out well, or will after I build a new drawer box, and the guy and his wife were both very pleased.

John