A Day in the Life of one Artist

Cathy and I paid a visit to the Simply Stickley showroom recently to look at drawers and how they slide. My initial idea was to use KV slides for the drawers. My preference for the slides is based on an antique three-drawer chest we bought nearly forty years ago. We dated the chest from about 1880 based on how the drawers were constructed. It was nothing spectacular, the kind of item one might have bought from a Sears catalog. It’s made of poplar. One hundred thirty years of pulling and pushing the drawers has produced considerable wear on the web frames and the drawer sides, so much that the drawers don’t fit easily in their spaces. There is no easy way to repair the wear, and the piece isn’t valuable enough to warrant the effort. The wear calculation is easy enough. One or two drawers of a chest of drawers will be opened and closed at least once a day. That’s 730 slides a year, 7,300 slides in ten years, 73,000 slides in a century. That’s a lot of wear. The modern Stickley reproductions use a traditional oak against oak slide. (I’ll show a detail when I get to the drawers.) Cathy prefers the more traditional approach used in better furniture. I’ll do the oak wood slides. Am I being optimistic about how long this piece and its mate (I don’t mean me and my wife.) will be around? I don’t think so. A soundly made and sensibly designed piece of furniture ought to last a century or more barring floods and fires. Think how much furniture was lost in Katrina-flooded New Orleans and fire-stormed-California.