[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] It's time for "The Woodsmith Shop" I'm Phil.

Today's episode blurs the line between home improvement project and woodworking furniture.

It's this bathroom vanity.

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And by... Kreg -- tools designed by woodworkers for woodworkers.

Create what inspires you.

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And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Mid-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ A bathroom vanity project like this one gives you the opportunity to customize the furniture and the projects that are in your house.

Now, a lot of times commercial units are just simple particle board with kind of a pretty face on it.

For this one, we chose a Shaker style design, and the original plans called for cherry, but we're going to use something different.

It's some ash that Logan actually milled right here in Iowa and cut it up into boards.

And we're going to create this great-looking project.

Now, this one features a lot of solid wood.

In addition to the solid wood top, we have frame and panel sides and the face frame, and even in the drawer fronts and doors.

A few well-chosen pieces of plywood rounded out and give it some structural stability.

Along the way, you're going to learn a lot of tips and tricks for building in solid wood and creating a long-lasting, great-looking project.

If you're ready to build along, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

But right now, it's time to build.

One of the defining features of this vanity project is the look of the construction on the case.

We're using frame and panel construction here.

Here's how that works.

I have two pieces that will be the legs that are like the stiles.

Then we're going to add a top rail, a middle stile, and a lower rail.

Now, these thick hardwood pieces get joined together and then with grooves in the middle, we'll accept a pair of hardwood panels.

The plans call for using cherry, but in this case, we're using some ash.

Logan actually milled it from right here in Central Iowa.

Now, the nice part is, is that this has a really great-looking grain, nice color, and will make a great project.

The plans also show for a joinery technique called stub tenon and groove that we've used often.

I'm going to throw a little wrench in that and go with my favorite joinery technique here, which is loose tenons.

The nice thing is, is with loose tenons, I'm focusing on one specific operation -- cutting mortises, in this case.

And then those mortises will be connected with loose tenons, pre-made pieces of hardwood that get glued between the two pieces, making a strong connection.

For wider pieces like this, we can use two in the joints for the intermediate stile.

I'll just need one.

And the way we're doing that is that you can use a wide variety of techniques.

You can make your own jigs, there's router jigs that'll do it.

I'm using one that's actually powered by a handheld drill.

I'll mark center lines where the joint is going to be, and then line up that center line with the same center line on the jig, clamp the piece in place, and then power up the drill and cut the mortise.

Same thing happens on the mating piece where you just line up the center lines, clamp it in place, and drill out those mortises.

Then, with one simple operation, we've taken care of all the joinery for our frame and panel sides.

With the joinery taken care of, the next step is a little bit of shaping, and what I want to do is cut a taper on the inside edge of our stiles, or legs, as we can call them, and I'll do that over at the band saw, cutting just outside that layout line.

Then back here at the workbench, a few swipes with a hand plane will clean it up down to those pencil lines.

The loose tenons took care of joining the individual pieces of our frame.

What we need to do now is accommodate the panels that have to go inside the frame.

To do that, we're here at the router table and I'm using a slot cutting bit.

What I've done is assembled the frames with the loose tenons, but no glue -- that's the key part right here.

No glue at this point.

I have a couple of clamps to hold everything in place.

I'm going to fire up the router and then route a groove around the inside of both of these openings in the frame, and that will create the stopped grooves that will house our panels.

The slot cutter bit that I'm using allows me to put extra cutters on it, so I can stack them up like a little mini dado blade, and that way I can use it to route rabbets on the door panels.

I'm sizing that rabbet so that the remaining tongue that's formed fits right into those grooves that I cut in the side assemblies.

Once we're done with this point, we're ready for assembly.

We cleared away the router table, which leaves just a few things to take care of.

Now, routing the grooves with the frame dry assembled means that the slot cutter is going to leave rounded corners where each of those pieces intersect.

To accommodate that, I took the panels and sanded a radius on each of the corners to fit into them.

Also, speaking of sanding, it's a good idea to sand the panels, because you're not going to be able to get into all those nooks and crannies later on, which gets us close to assembly.

One final step, speaking of the panels, is that it's a good idea to put some finish on these panels before you glue it up.

Again, it makes it a lot easier to get a nice even coat of finish on the panels before they get glued into place.

I'm just going to wipe on an oil-based finish here, wait a few minute, and then wipe off the excess.

Which leads us to the assembly part.

What I'll do is put some glue on the loose tenons and in the mortises on the center stile and the two rails, creating an I-shaped assembly here.

I can slip the panels into place at that point, and then, working from one side to the other, I'll put glue on the mortises and the loose tenons, and then clamp everything together.

The parts and the joints kind of keep things all nice and square, but it's a good thing to check before you walk away.

We've had a router table session.

Now it's time for a session here at the table saw.

While I have the side assemblies in clamps and the glue drying over on the other side of the shop, what I have here is the case bottom and then the back of the case.

These two pieces are plywood, and I want to take care of some dados that I need to cut.

The big thing here is that the width of your dado blade needs to match the thickness of your plywood for a snug fit on the two pieces.

Now, the dado that I have set up to cut here is to hold a vertical divider that will separate the drawer compartment from the under-sink compartment in the vanity.

I'll make that in the case bottom and the back, and then we'll bring the sides back into play.

After cutting the two dados, I'm going to reposition the rip fence and cut a groove on the lower edge of the case back to accept the case bottom.

While we have this dado blade set up, there are a few other joinery cuts that we need to make.

The first is on the inside face of our side assemblies.

The only problem here is what to do about the legs that they stick out here.

Because ordinarily on the rip fence, they aren't going to register.

So what I've done is clamped a long auxiliary fence to the rip fence.

That's going to guide the side assembly both before the cut and as I complete the cut, to make sure that that dado is straight.

Once I've taken care of that, I'm going to swap out the auxiliary fence for one where I can bring the dado blade right up against it and cut a rabbet on the back edge of the side assemblies that will house the case back.

After doing a bunch of stuff on a project like this, I start to get a little impatient and want to see how it's going to turn out.

Thankfully, there's a purpose even beyond that.

So, what I've done is brought together my side assemblies along with the case bottom and back that I was working on and the divider, brought those together with clamps, again, without glue.

But this time what I want to do is use that as a real life gauge to size the pieces that I'm going to need for the face frame.

So, there's two long legs, or stiles, here that are just like the ones on the end assemblies.

Then we have long rails, top and bottom, that will frame the opening on the front of this vanity.

Then we're going to add a few others.

There's a narrower divider here that separates the drawers from the door section.

And then finally, there are two pieces here that are going to be dividing the drawer compartments so that we have three equal sized drawers in this particular vanity.

Well, you can locate them wherever you want.

Like before, I'm going to use loose tenons to join all these parts together.

So my next move is to get everything clamped in place, mark the center lines on the pieces, and then go back to my mortising jig and drill out the mortises, and bring this back together.

You can think of the face frame for this vanity as being very similar to the side assemblies.

A frame and panel, hold the panel.

But I did things a little bit out of order just because of its overall finish size.

And the first thing that I did was took the long outer stiles over to the table saw and cut a rabbet on the back side that will wrap around the side assemblies.

Then I added the little taper down at the bottom, same way as I did before.

But then I started with the assembly on it, and because it's so big, I took that in stages.

Stage one is this little divider stile that I glued to the upper and lower rails.

From there, I added the short drawer divider rails, as well as that outer stile on this side.

Give the glue a little bit of time, and then I was able to clamp on and attach the other outer stile on the opposite edge, which is where we are right now.

I'm going to leave this in the clamps for a little bit, and then I need to cut a groove on the back side down below, just like we did with the other ones.

There, I attached a long auxiliary rip fence.

But here, because of this length, what I'm going to do is attach the auxiliary fence to the ends of these stiles that'll run against the rip fence on the table saw, giving me a consistent surface to plow that groove.

There are enough parts in this vanity project to warrant having a plan, and gluing this up in several stages, and that's what I did here.

I started by laying the case back down on a couple of saw horses.

That, I found, was the easiest way to be able to get clamps where I needed them.

Then I ran a bead of glue in the groove that's going to hold the case bottom, and then I brush out all the glue in order to be able to get a good bond here between the parts, especially with the plywood.

Then I could set the case bottom into place, used a couple of clamping squares to hold it in the position that I needed to.

At that point, I was able to add the divider into its dado as well as the dado in the case bottom, put some glue in those as well, and brush it out.

A couple of clamps and some more clamping squares keep all of those parts in the orientation that they need to.

Then I let it set for a little while in order to get ready for the next stage.

And that was to add the side assemblies.

Here again, spread some glue in the dado that goes across the bottom of those side assemblies and the rabbet along the back edge, and then tip those into place.

The joints were tight enough here that I needed a mallet to encourage the parts to come together that the way they should.

Then I added clamps across the bottom and then on the back to keep those parts in line.

The last step in the process is getting the face frame here.

Save the pretty part till the end.

Again, glue into the rabbets and then the groove along the bottom.

And then I'm ready to set that in place.

A little bit of mallet work.

And as you can see, a good handful of clamps are necessary to get a nice bond here.

I'm going to let this set up.

And then all that's left is to take care of some of the innards.

Just a few pieces left to wrap up the construction and the structure of our vanity cabinet.

And this is where the little thrifty part of you can really find some joy, because we're going to use solid wood pieces to support the three drawers that will go in on this side.

And it's a great place to use up all those little scrappy pieces that you've been collecting as we've been working on all these parts.

What that looks like, though, depends on each side of the drawer.

Because of this solid plywood divider on this side, all we need are little pieces of hardwood that get screwed to that divider to support the drawer from below.

The plywood will guide the drawer side to side.

Over on this side, because of the face frame, what we need to do first is add a pair of filler pieces on the inside, and then you need to make these L-shaped supports here.

So what we have are guides that will, again, keep the drawer running in straight back and forth, and then a strip to hold the drawer up from below.

They're just screwed in place.

And then I can turn this whole thing over to Logan for drawers and doors.

So now that Phil has the case of the vanity done, it's time to deck it out with a set of drawers and doors.

We're gonna start the doors here at the table saw.

Now, I have my parts roughly sized, and I'm going to take a moment before I cut anything to lay them all out and make sure that my rails and stiles all look like they're in the same family.

We only have one shot to get this grain pattern right.

So taking a moment here just to make sure everything lays out how I want it to is time well spent.

Okay, there we go.

So, I'm looking not only at the grain pattern, so I have nice straight grain, I'm also looking at the hues and the colors of the different parts to make sure they all look like they're in the same family.

So now I'll just mark these.

And now I know those all go together.

So this door construction starts with a centered groove on the inside of all these parts.

And I've already set up a blade in the table saw.

And this is a 1/4-inch-wide grooving blade.

It's going to create a flat top groove.

And this is going to accept the panels, as well as be one part of the joint that's going to hold these parts together.

We'll cut a stub tenon here in a little bit.

So, first thing to do... ...is to bring in the fence.

And I'm going to use a setup block that's a 1/4-inch wide.

I'm going to use that to roughly place the fence.

There we go.

So now, in theory, this is going to be perfectly centered, but in practicality, it may be off a little bit.

So as I'm creating these grooves, I'm going to make two passes -- make one pass and then rotate the part around and place the opposite face up against the fence and make another pass.

So now that we have the grooves cut, we can concentrate on the next part of the joint, and that's going to be the tenons on the ends of these rails.

And to create those, I've loaded up a dado blade here.

And you can see I have a sacrificial fence that I've put over top of the blade, and that's to create a tenon that is about 1/2 inch long.

That matches up to the 1/2-inch-deep groove that we just formed.

Another thing I've done is I've roughly set the height of this blade to form a 1/4-inch-thick tenon.

And I'm going to use a scrap piece of stock here that's the same thickness as my rails to test this out.

I'll make a pass on both faces and then check and see how that fits in that groove we made.

If it needs adjusted, I can raise or lower the blade to adjust the thickness of the tenon until I get a good glue-tight fit.

All right, so now that we have all of our parts cut, we can go ahead and fine-tune the joints.

Now, at the table saw, I went ahead and cut those tenons to about the right size, but they're a little snug.

I could get them to go together, but I risk breaking off one part of that groove.

And as soon as I spread glue on there, the moisture is going to cause it to swell.

It's just going to be too tight.

So what I want to do is I want to loosen up these tenons slightly.

And to do that... I use what's called a shoulder plane.

Now, the shoulder plane has a blade that goes clear to the outside edges of the body.

That means that I can sneak right up to this shoulder on that tenon and trim it down.

And the key here is I make exactly the same passes on both sides.

So there's two passes.

There's two passes.

And then I test it.

And that slips together much easier.

Okay.

So now, before I glue this up, I'm going to slip this panel in place.

Now, this panel has a tongue cut on it, and I cut it using the same dado blade setup that I did to create these tenons.

However, I just dropped the blade slightly because I'm only cutting that tongue on the one side.

So this will slip right in place.

And then, this other stile goes right on the other side.

So, with that done, I'm going to do just a little bit of presanding on the inside edges of all these parts and this panel, because those are going to be hard to reach once this has been glued up.

But then I could apply the glue and put some clamps on it.

Now that our doors of our vanity are in clamps and drying, we can go ahead and start working on the drawers.

There are three drawers in this vanity, with the bottom drawer being the deepest.

So what we're going to do is we are going to create the drawer boxes using plywood, and we will have a front that's out of that hardwood ash.

Now, what I like about these drawers is they're simple to cut at the table saw.

We're going to use two different types of joints.

We're going to use a tongue-and-dado joint on the back.

We're going to use a locking rabbet on the front.

But the setup for them is exactly the same.

So what I've done is I've loaded up an 1/8-inch flat-top grooving blade.

This is going to create a groove that is flat, and it's going to create one part of our joint.

So our first task here is to take the sides of all of our drawers.

And we're going to cut a dado across these.

We're going to create that on both ends of these of all of the drawer sides.

Now, the second half of this joint is kind of a two-part cut.

I've loaded up a dado blade here with that auxiliary rip fence, very much the same way we made the parts for the doors.

And the first thing we're going to create is this tongue that's going to be for the back panel.

This tongue is sized so that it fits inside of that dado we just cut.

And it fits really nicely, and it's going to create that back joint.

Now, I've removed the sacrificial fence, and we're going to go ahead and cut the joint for the fronts, which are these pieces of ash.

And to do this...we're going to stand those fronts on end, and we're going to create a groove along the edge of the fronts.

Now I've re-installed the sacrificial fence and lowered that dado blade, and all we're going to do is we're going to nip off this thin tongue to make it shorter to fit in that groove.

We're at the point now where we can glue these up.

The last thing I did at the table saw was cut this groove for the bottom panel.

And I've cut those bottom panels to size.

Now, one thing I really like about this tongue-and-dado joint and the locking rabbet on the front is this entire thing is pretty self-squaring once you get glue applied and apply clamps.

I will double-check the corner dimensions just to make sure that the drawers are square, but the joints do lead to them being square as you apply clamps.

So now we're going to apply glue to the tongues, insert those into the dados, and get some clamps on.

So now that all the storage pieces of our vanity are done, we can concentrate on the countertop.

Now, because this is a vanity, no one would blame you for going out and getting a piece of granite for the top.

However, this is a good opportunity to glue up a solid wood top, like I've done here.

This is three pieces of ash, and it's been cut to width.

Now the only thing I need to do to this is create some trim that's going to kind of form a backsplash.

I have a piece that will get cut with an arch for the back, and then these will get cut... with a gentle curve for the sides.

And you can see I've profiled that curve out here in permanent marker just so I can cut it out with the band saw.

So the next steps are going to be to cut this out... Then I'm going to sand it smooth with a spindle sander.

And I've double-sided taped both of these together so I can do it all at once, and they're going to match.

Then, once they're cut and smoothed out, we can install them onto this top with screws from the bottom side.

Okay.

With the trim attached and the doors mounted, really, the only thing left to do is talk about how I'm going to attach the top.

I'm a pretty big fan of these.

These are figure-8 fasteners.

And I like these, especially when you're talking about a solid wood top, because the design of these allows them to pivot as the top expands and contracts with changes in humidity.

Now all we have left to do is some final sanding, fine-tuning the fit of the doors, and applying a finish.

♪♪ To wrap up the work on this project, Logan turned some knobs from ash that matches the material here on the vanity project.

He also got the sink and the faucet installed.

Now, this vanity is going to be living at his place, anyway, and it's just another example of how you can customize and personalize your home with the projects you build.

If you're ready to do the same, the projects for this vanity and many other projects are available on the website -- WoodsmithShop.com.

Until next time, and then, we'll see you right back here in the Woodsmith Shop.

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Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition, with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD.

Or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters.

Offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

And by... Kreg, tools designed by woodworkers for woodworkers.

Create what inspires you.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

And by... ♪♪ ♪♪