Progress over the last few months has been slow and sporadic. Today I reached a milestone: the first dry fit. It wasn’t intentional; I don’t like joinery to suffer more abuse than absolutely necessary but I needed to put it together to transfer some lines to between the front, back and the ends.

This is a bit of joinery I’ve been worrying about and looking forward to in equal measure. I drew it out, at one quarter scale, before I started so I knew it should work. But those are famous last words.  The style/leg joins the front and back to the sides. A simple groove in the long grain of the bottom panels on the faces and ends  is easy to cut with a plough plane. But this groove must be carried through the leg. There are two mortices and tenons to navigate as well so it was always going to be interesting.

Fortunately it was less than exciting. Having ploughed the grooves in the front and back panels I put the styles on and marked the housing. Once I chopped them I assembled the whole shooting match in order to make sure everything lined up and to mark the grooves for the end pieces.

This gave the first glimpse of what it will look like. Of course I couldn’t resist the temptation to carry it across the back garden (hardly an epic journey) through the house (again – not a great marathon) and put in the front hall – just to see how it looks.

But that photograph will wait for another day.