My first commission

The awesomely wonderful company that I work for runs a yearly "Personal Progression Program" that encourages employees to expand their horizons and branch out into new things. I think I mentioned it already back when they paid for me to take the woodworking course that let to this... uh, current obsession.

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!