Well, they're offering it again this year (with prizes!), and my 3P goal is to continue getting better at this woodworking thing and - eventually - build us a nice new coffee table for the living room.
Step one in this process is finally diving in and learning SketchUp. Or at least, learning to use the bits of SketchUp I need to know - that is one seriously powerful program.
Rather than trying to design a coffee table as my very first project, I thought it might be easier to draw up something that I had already built - or at least started. A few months ago, my neighbour mentioned that she hated the closet door in her master bath. It wasn't very nice, and the louvres were always dusty and a pain in the ass to clean. Well, I jumped right in and said I could build a bi-fold door for her, no problem! (Not that I'd ever actually done such a thing.)
So I made a couple of floating panel doors with glass inserts and stub-tenon joinery, similar in overall construction to the ones I had made on the scotch cabinet I built in the Woodworking Level II course (the first time I took it). Seeing as how they were already done (except for the hardware) and while the varnish was drying, I thought I could try drawing them up in SketchUp and maybe learn a little more about the software. I had already ordered an instructional DVD from Fine Woodworking and watched it a few times through.
As it turned out I was able to use a lot of the tutorials and tips from the DVD to draw up the doors. they don't really look like much at an initial glance:
But once you zoom in and turn on the x-ray vision option, you can really see the amount of detail and the power of the software. All of this is the actual joinery I used to construct the door.
Of course, I think the doors themselves are pretty snazzy, too.
They're made entirely from red cedar, which I'm not 100% sure I'd do again. Beautiful wood to work with, but really, really soft. Difficult to keep it from getting dinged up.
I did not make the glass panels. I'm not THAT nuts. It's a little hard to tell, what with our awful stucco behind them, but the glass IS frosted.
Let's hope my neighbour likes them as much as I do!
