When I was a kid, I was helping Dad and Papa remodel the house next door to my grandparents who lived at the top of a hill on Caroline Street. (They lived “down in the city,” which seemed huge to me as I was from the country.) The house next door was a two-story, two-family house with one apartment upstairs and one downstairs as was fairly common in the city. They were enclosing the front porch into living space, complete with octagon window and fireplace, and cladding the whole house in new country blue vinyl siding (which was all the rage in the 80s). The front porch of the house had a section that was covered in a wide board-and-batten pine siding. As was Dad’s custom, this was pulled off and saved to be repurposed somewhere else someday. The “good stuff” always came home with him to be used as needed.
Years went by and I was now a teenager. After years of sharing with my brother, and then living in the basement during the remodel, all three of us kids each had our own room! So finally, I had my space with nice painted walls and carpeting and actual doors… it was glory. It was the the end of the 80s and I was really into country/primitive/shaker-style furniture. I saw this tall narrow cabinet with two doors in a home magazine and wanted to build something like it. Dad said he would help me, so it became our little project. He said, “You know, I think I have a few boards that we can use to make this.” And you guessed it, we pulled out some of those pine boards from the Caroline Street house remodel! The cabinet is about 11” deep, 22” wide and 81” tall. We used one board each for the sides, and then ripped the rest for the front and doors. The top door is taller and has three shelves inside, and the bottom door has two shelves. We put it all together, sanded it down, and rubbed it with Early American stain and a polyurethane finish coat. Then we painted the inside a nice medium country blue. The doors have black strap style hinges. For the knobs, Dad did something interesting. He too a piece of a branch, and cut it so it was like a round knob. then drilled a dowel through the back of it, and then put it through a hole in the door and attached it to a flat piece of wood. So when you turn the knob, it locks or unlocks the door. It’s very subtle and blends in to the simplicity of the cabinet. The one decorative touch that we did add was a large crown moulding at the top to give it a little flair. It turned out so great and we were both pretty proud of how it turned out, and I was so happy to have worked on this project with Dad. It looked amazing in my new bedroom.
After college in the mid 90s, it made its way to Indiana, in the front seat of my 2 door Acura Integra coupe, funnily enough. I had to put the front passenger seat all the way back and slide the cabinet in through the hatchback, and amazingly enough, it just fit! And 750 miles later… that’s how it arrived here. Later on, when I lived in this tiny little house in Winona Lake, one of the kids from the college was really into building stuff, and he loved that cabinet, so and he and I built a very similar piece for him. I wonder if he still has it!
So the cabinet has moved about to quite a few different houses over the years, and now it is sitting in my office next to my desk here in Osceola as I type this. It’s still in pretty good shape, and holds lots of photos and memorabilia from childhood. Over the years, I have built, remodeled, and repurposed a lot of things – but this primitive style cabinet was one of the early projects that I loved building with my Dad. He passed away in 2010, so it makes it all the more special that I have this piece of furniture that we made together as father and son.