What can you make out of this?

Someone recently came to me to find out what I could make from some old Walnut boards he'd had in his basement for years. I don't know how he got them, but there they were four beautiful Walnut boards he'd been moving from house to house for quite a few years.

He'd like a poker table, he said. So I measured the boards and set to work on a plan. I learned that it's a whole lot easier to pick out the lumber to match a project, than it is to match a project to the lumber. For starters, what looks like a lot of lumber sometimes really isn't. Especially when you consider the number of pieces that you need to cut from long boards. No matter how I tried to lay the table out, I kept coming up short, and I didn't want to buy any new lumber in case it didn't match well once it was sanded and varnished.

Okay, "How about an Entertainment Cabinet for my projection TV?" He asked. I was still a bit short of what I'd need, but if I added new lumber for the bottom and the back, where it wouldn't matter, I should make it.

He (or maybe it was his wife) gave me some design ideas. I got to drawing and came up with a cabinet that the TV would sit on. It raised the TV to a good viewing height and it came out from the wall just the right distance for the depth of the set. They wanted solid doors (no glass), but they wanted the doors to slide into the sides of the cabinet when they were opened for using the cable box. I came up with the idea to use some beautiful flame Brazilian Rosewood veneer I had, for the door fronts.

The piece looks much nicer in his house than it did when it was sitting on my shop floor. And the bonus is that if he ever gets rid of the big TV, he'll still have a nice cabinet that can be re-purposed for something else. Reduce, reuse, recycle!