The Finish Line

This is a picture of a pretty-much-almost-done china cabinet in its new habitat, hulking darkly in the corner of my dining room and looking pretty much like, well, a china cabinet. If you find this a little surprising, I can assure you that you're not the only one. 

Mom and Dad dropped it off a few Thursdays ago, along with the last of the blue paint and some well-wishes: after some preventive planing and hinge-tweaking, we left the bottom doors to settle before committing to finishing the edges. Three weeks later, they're all painted up, and  they open and close like a dream, but let's all knock on (poplar) wood just in case, shall we?

Scraping paint off the glass, or off the wood you just touched up? Surprise! Sometimes it's the same thing!

Hey, so it turns out china cabinets can be, like, hold dishes and stuff! And with that, fourteen months after moving in, the guest room is free of the tyranny of The Box. Give me your poor, your huddled egg coddlers, yearning to breathe free!

All put away, with a little room to grow on.

Today, I did the very last no-really-it's-done-this-time step: I bought some #8 wood screws and some washers and installed the wine-glass rack right over the gun rests. I did not drill through the bottom of the upper cabinet, which I would like added to my tombstone, please. On a related note, my wine glasses are enormous and do not want to be friends, but they will just have to get over it. 

So here we are: after many months and many weekend hours and much inhaled sawdust, I am the owner of a finished china cabinet built by my dad's and my own hands out of my friend's late grandmother's gun rack. You know, like you do.

The truth is that I love it even more than I expected to: it's exactly what I was thinking of, standing on Grandma Ann's lawn back in July, only better. I'm so grateful to my dad for jumping in and spending his Sunday afternoons (not to mention a few Niner games, which I offered to let him watch) in the garage with me, talking sense and making sure I didn't lose any limbs to the circular saw. It's a beautiful cabinet, and it makes me very happy, in no small part because it makes me think of those days. 

So this is the end—almost. I'm planning one more photo post, chronicling the entire process from start to finish. And then I will probably just go and make some coddled eggs and tea and light some candles and put a few flowers in glassware, just because I can.