♪♪ Hi, and welcome again to the "Woodsmith Shop."

On today's episode we're going to try something a little bit different and for the project it's something that's going to add beauty, organization and value to your home.

We're looking at built-in projects and they can come in a wide variety of styles and flavors.

We're going to kick things off with a special interview with Brent Hull.

He builds and restores historic homes and offers great perspective and ideas on how to design a built-in project.

From there, we're going to dive into some of the tips and techniques that will help you build your built in projects so that they work better and look great.

If you want some ideas for built-in projects, plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

Let's get started.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters, offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

-And by... -Kreg.

From the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond wood glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ As woodworkers, we can get a little antsy if we want to make something for our house like a built-in, we really just want to head out to the shop, start cutting up material and building something.

But I think it pays to step back a little bit, consider the design as well as maybe the historical setting of our house to make sure that that built in looks like it belongs with the house -- so I'm with Brent Hull, our special guest today, to talk about how to make our built-ins better by considering its context.

Yeah.

So if you look historically, the, you know, the tradition of built-ins is strong -- Georgian, Federal period, they were putting their, you know, China and other things to display, certainly in the Victorian period, arts and crafts, colonial revival.

That tradition is carried forward.

The built-in, in my mind, is one of those defining characteristics that can not only communicate the style of the house, but the history of it, too.

Sure.

And I think what's interesting is that it's almost like a blend between kind of the moldings and the casework of a house with something that's a little bit more practical, too, because you find built-ins everywhere.

No doubt; you find a wide variety of things that were site-built, taking moldings, building mantels or doing things like that, but also things that were shop-built and brought in.

So there there is a variety of style, ability, you know, level of craftsmanship.

Sure.

Everything.

So we can do things in a wide variety of ways.

Still call it a built-in.

Yeah.

But, you know, probably most people now when they think of built-in are thinking kitchen cabinets.

We're looking at a different type of construction here.

Yeah.

As I was talking about these catalogs that I use to reference, you know, what was built historically, kitchen cabinets really don't show up in millwork catalogs until the late '20s.

And so, you know, in the Victorian period, the 1880s, 1890s, even into the 1915s, you really don't see kitchen cabinets.

You see a lot of built-ins, buffets, corner cabinets, things like that, in the catalogs; you really don't see cabinets.

I mean, because kitchen was a work area, it really wasn't a, you know, where you brought your guests like we would do today.

Yeah.

So I thought it was really interesting to be able to see it in terms of, you know, like you reference, and for your work, a lot of these historic millwork catalogs that, you know, we think millwork as moldings and crowns and all that kind of stuff, but it's way more than that.

It's way more than that.

I mean, if you -- if you're just looking at the millwork catalogs from the 1870s into the 1940s, there are small sections for moldings, you know?

Certainly there's doors and windows, but there's huge sections on the built-in furniture, which is what they would call it -- stairs, all the -- the mantels certainly, big sections on that.

Yeah.

And we were looking at like some of the colonnades, you know, to divide a room or separate spaces without making them walls.

And that would be another one where you can really inject, you know, great architectural details, great history, craftsmanship.

I mean, the colonnade is a great one.

So now if we think about that, let's talk a little bit about some of those historic context that we're looking at, you know, because we have, throughout the history of the country, different styles, and what those styles, you know, have had hallmarks of shapes and ornament.

You bet.

What I tell people and teach about quite a bit is that, you know, every style, there are characteristics that define it.

And, you know, a Federal mantel versus a Georgia mantel are completely different, they -- the Federal mantel would be much more light, dainty, oftentimes will have applied swags.

There is ornament that was popular during different time -- period of times.

And so I think it is one of, you know, I think you can kind of put your hand in the past and bring a mantel forward and go, "Oh, that's Victorian."

Well, how do we know that?

Well, the shapes, the sizes of the moldings and the way it's ornamented tell a story.

Yeah.

And it tells a story about, like, the materials that were available.

No doubt, everything.

Yeah.

From the nails, right?

I mean there is -- I went to school called North Bennet Street studying historic preservation.

We used to date things, you know, take a molding off the wall and depending on the saw marks, right?

If it was hand-sawn, pit-sawn, it was done.

You know, the nails, whether it's a round nail or cut nail or forge nail.

And so everything dates itself, as I say, sometimes in like, you know, the conversation pits, smoked mirrors.

It's the same with built-ins and, you know, everything dates itself, right?

Yeah.

Well, because one of the things you were showing in the catalog here was how technology begins to influence the house in terms of having a built-in specifically dedicated for a phone.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And that tells a wonderful story too, right, about technology and how it becomes infused.

But essentially you have, I don't know, three periods.

You have a pre-industrial, right, where things were all handmade.

You have a, you know, post-industrial, which, for millwork, happens after the Civil War, 1870 into the 1940s.

And then you have a post-World War II, where you get into, you know, hollow-core doors and things that aren't -- for a woodworker, aren't as interesting.

And so you have that period between Civil War and World War II which is so interesting to me, where a lot of things are made in factories, some things are made on site, but they tell a story.

Yeah, I guess what I really like about seeing these catalogs and the way you describe it in that pre-industrial area is that you were getting, really, ingredients, and then it was up to individual craftsmen to mix and match those and make them their own.

Yeah, that's one of the fun things about it, is you do see the personality sometimes and the skill of the craftsmen showing up in the mill work for sure.

Yeah.

So what kind of materials are we talking about here?

When you see, especially in the work that you do and in the houses that you're working in, how were these built-ins made?

Yeah.

So we're, you know, we're -- we specialize in pre-1940 things.

And so that goes back -- we're in Texas, so we don't have Georgian buildings.

So everything is solid material.

There's really... Plywood is used.

You'll see it in doors, door panels, one-panel, two-panel doors.

You'll see it sometimes on an exterior door as a veneer that's laying across, early veneer doors, 1900, but majority, 90% of it, is all solid wood, solid lumber.

And I'm talking for the backs of the cabinets, you know, to the side panels.

You know, everything was made solid wood.

Yeah.

And that influences how it looks, though, too, right?

Because I mean, I think of like a built-in where you'd want to, you know, it's really easy to just take some plywood and nail it to the back and that's it.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, you see, if you open the cabinet door, you see the glass, the cabin door, the bead board back, right.

That -- it was -- solid wood and, you know, sometimes decorative, like a bead board, but I think that really infuses character, right?

It's sometimes those little layering of things that can help infuse character and make it seem like it's 100 years older than it is.

And that's why we're building something, is to have those things for people to notice it, even though they may not notice it.

Right?

Well, in this day and age, when a lot of things are made overseas and a lot of things are cheaper and cheaper material and, you know, we're using wood that was wood, no longer wood; those things are real to me.

Right?

That those things are exciting and, you know, just more interesting.

You know, one often-overlooked part of doing built-in cabinetry is the back.

The back can actually add a lot of interest to your project.

Now, there's literally a million different ways that you can handle the back.

But let's take a look at a couple of simple, easy ones.

First off, this is a plywood product that is scored to look like bead board.

Those vertical lines and that texture can really add a lot of interest.

Next, think about just a plain back.

Now, you might think that's a little dull, but think about all the different ways you could finish that plain back.

You can paint, you can stain it natural.

I think one nice thing to do is to give it a contrasting color or tone to the rest of your project -- make it stand out, make it pop a little bit.

If you'd like something a little more busy, take a look at these individual, rustic looking bead board boards.

Become an eight foot length, and they're perfect for so many projects.

Once again, think about that contrasting color.

So when you're designing your project, don't just think about shelves, sides, doors; think about the back, think about how it visually projects into the room.

And that will really help pick up your project and make it look great.

A glue bottle and some nails will get you through most of the assembly for a built-in cabinet.

But there are some places where we need some good joinery.

And one of them is the face frame.

See, one of the things we're always fighting with a built-in cabinet is we need to be sure we're level or plumb or square, and good joinery in your face frame will help keep things square and it'll help keep wide joints from opening.

And that's particularly important if you're doing paint grade work.

So what I'm going to do here is just use simple pocket screws to assemble a face frame, and pocket screws are convenient, they're easy, and they give us that additional strength that's so important.

♪♪ ♪♪ Now as we move from, you know, like where design and construction to start to interact with each other a little bit more, like, we want to... What are some ways to use the house as a cue for building something?

So if you're talking, you know, Colonial Revival, or you're talking, you know, the revival era -- '20s to '40s, or you have English and Mediterranean and Colonial Revivals, there are -- there's a palette of design details that are kind of appropriate to that era.

But, you know, with each one, you go to the Arts and Crafts, go to the Victorian, there is a design language that's a part of each one of those eras that is specific.

And if we pulled one out, we look at it and go, "Yeah, that's Victorian."

Well, why is it Victorian?

Well, there's stain grade wood, right.

Because they were -- we were mass harvesting our virgin forests at that time.

We had wonderful wood choices and wood selection.

And so if you go to the Arts and Crafts period it, you know, oftentimes stain grade, but less ornamentation, less details.

And all of those things are, I think, what make them special.

Yeah.

So you can use, like, the scale of your house or the room that you're going to put this built-in as a way to help you size your pieces.

So it's not just a slab of bookcase, screw it to the wall -- built-in.

Well, and remember, too, that these would have shown up in formal areas of the house.

Right?

And so a dining room, formal living, mantels, corner hat cabinets, things like that.

Whereas, you know, the formal dining room isn't necessarily as important today, but that period is very important.

So if you're looking to where to install or put those pieces in an historic house, they're pretty -- there's pretty obvious spaces that it's more appropriate.

Yeah.

Now, let's talk a little bit -- you know, one thing that we were discussing is the idea of scaling, you know, for some built-ins, it's appropriate to go floor-to-ceiling with it, maybe some houses it's not.

So if you look at a lot of these things, the great thing about historic references like these catalogs, which you can find on eBay, you can find them around.

But they are -- they do actually list out their sizes.

So if us doing historic preservation, we also -- we always want to know the historic precedent, like, what size would it have been?

So that's a great place to start.

The second thing is, is that, you know, they were trying to mimic a piece of furniture, right?

So the built-in, it can't get too big, right?

It can't -- because the scale's messed up.

Right?

And so these things should fit within -- like, if I'm thinking of a dining room wall with a butler's pantry on one side and a door to the living room on the other side, there's a natural, you know, scale that's going to be created by the height of the door, the height of the room, and then that space you've got in the wall.

And so we don't want to overpower it.

We don't want to be too large.

And so between looking at historic precedent, there is a typical size of each of these areas that you can do.

And you'll see them -- as you as you scale through the different periods, you'll say, oh, look how much bigger they are, look how much more ornamented they are.

And so it's a little bit more -- a little bit of art and science.

But you are, you know, kind of feeling out your space based on the scale of things that are already in the room as part of the, you know, rationale.

Yeah.

And even when you're building it, like, you know, I feel like it's really easy or tempting to just make a single unit that goes all the way up.

But we want to look at maybe massing to have like this sense of solidity at the bottom, lightness as you move up.

Well, you'll see a couple of things in those things -- in almost all of them.

One is they had a really nice sense of scale and proportion.

And so that means larger drawers on the bottom, oftentimes broken up into the kind of the rule of threes that you would have, you know, two things balanced by something in the middle.

They would be the same on either side.

And so they no doubt followed those rules because they were looking at historic furniture as well.

And certainly that did that in the Colonial area.

I don't know if you've ever seen the, you know, studies of the proportions of the Colonial highboy, Right.

You know, their -- It was -- it was worked out, right?

It wasn't random.

It wasn't an accident.

And they followed a lot of those rules.

So you'll see balance, you'll see wonderful scale and which makes them so attractive.

Yeah.

And which I think makes it more attractive for home woodworkers like us, where we can incorporate that stuff that it's just not as... economical for an industrial scale to do.

I think that one of the things -- we always should be learning from the past, right?

And the in the things that they studied at those times, I tell people oftentimes that the human scale to, you know, houses and buildings and things has been lost, in my opinion.

And so we are trying to reintroduce that scale into the things that we build.

And they are -- if you've ever walked into space and go, "Gosh, I don't know, I like it, but I don't know why I like it."

Right?

There's a human scale to that.

And there's things that draw us to that.

And so if we can practice those things and learn from the past, we'll build more beautiful things.

Yeah.

And you know, another thing that we were talking about is the idea of...

I mean, it plays together in terms of, you know, lower down some of these larger items, or the sizing of the components are going to be one size; as you move up, those components are naturally going to get smaller.

Absolutely.

Larger drawers in the bottom, you know, thinner drawers as they grow up.

And again, I mean, just look at an old highboy, and you see this balance that there's one large drawer, then there might be two smaller drawers over top of it.

You're seeing that quite a bit.

It also makes sense functionally like, you know, heavier things lower down, you know, smaller things as you get to the top.

So it makes sense visually, but also practically.

And now when we want to kind of marry that project, this built-in project to the rest of the house and we want to address it with casework and moldings and ornamentation in that way too, is, as a home woodworker, we have that opportunity to not rely on something pre-made, but to go with that same skill.

No doubt.

And, you know, I think we were talking earlier about moldings.

It's hard to get good moldings today, right?

Just go into a big box store.

They oftentimes don't have moldings of the scale that you would see in an older house.

And so the fact that, you know, in a 1920s house, you have moldings that are full 3/4 inch thick, is hard to get sometimes today.

And so there are design clues, right, that can help you.

And usually when we're building a kitchen for a client, we are saying, look, you've got that wonderful built-in in your thing, that's the way we want to make the cabinets -- the doors will be inset, you know, that hardware will be exposed, you know, paint-grade, stain-grade, whatever we're doing," but we've got -- and people with old houses have design clues that can begin to help them.

"Okay, well, look at that door casing.

Look at that wonderful header over top of that.

That's the kind of detail we want to introduce on this piece because it needs to speak to the rest of the house."

Right.

So there's a sense of, you know, you would see like even with Colonial Revival, that they were bringing elements from the colonial era, but they weren't a straight up reproduction necessarily.

You're using all of that to kind of inform.

You'll see, in '40s catalogs, they have a reeded casing.

Right, which goes back to the Colonial era, Federal, you know, reeded detail was very popular.

And so that's a good example of picking from the past something that's going to remind you and make you -- Like, the worst thing is when you go to an old house and you walk in the kitchen, you know, like... you know, it looks like it's, you know, something from IKEA catalog, right?

Is just not appropriate to an old house.

And those are the design clues you want to bring together that infuse it and make it feel like it's, "Oh, yeah, this has always been there.

This is a" -- you know, they add value and it adds charm and character and.

All the good things.

Like they grew together.

Like they grew together.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Raise your hand if your house is totally level and square.

Yeah, mine isn't either.

Now, that could be a real problem.

When you're making a built-in project for your house -- you want to build that project so that the doors work, the drawers operate smoothly, but if everything is out of kilter, that can be really tough to do, and it can be really challenging to try and level a large cabinet project.

So I learned this trick and it's revolutionized the way that I build built-ins, and that's to separate the base of the built-in from the actual project itself.

Now what I do is take some of my leftover plywood -- this also touches all the buttons for being a little thrifty too.

Over at the table saw, I can rip a bunch of strips to a consistent width.

Then back here at the workbench, I can take those strips and assemble them into a frame.

No need for special joinery here, just glue and screws.

So I like to drill some pilot holes and then drive the screws into place, making sure that I keep it square, and all of my surfaces are flush.

Now I'll take this base to where I'm going to put the built-in in the house.

I'll set it in place, then grab a level and start checking out side to side, front to back, on where I need to add a little bit of help, drop in a few shims along the way to get it where it's level, then to make sure it stays that way, I've cut a set of blocks from that same plywood.

I can clamp those blocks on the inside of the frame, and then I can drive some screws in to lock those blocks in place.

Then I'll take more screws and go through the back of my frame into the walls of the house, locking it down.

Now I have a flat, strong, level base, so when I build my cabinet project in the shop, I can bring it in, drop it down.

And I know that the doors aren't going to rack out a square and that the drawers are going to slide in smoothly and easily.

As my sister says, work smarter, not harder.

What do you think as some of the -- maybe some of the pitfalls that people can run into when they're working on a built-in that we can think about avoiding?

Well, I mean, you started off talking about, you know, sometimes you want to rush in there and start building.

It has to start with design, in my opinion, and design has to be paired with the history of it.

And so literally the first thing I talk to our clients about when we're working on their house is, do you have any historic pictures?

You know, what is the story of the past?

How much has been changed?

What's really going on?

And so those things, understanding the past, understanding what was there, sometimes we get great design clues from things that have been taken off over time.

And then other times, you are...

So there's the design piece -- just, we got to make sure that it that it works with the house, it tells the same story.

And sometimes using history can help infuse that -- so, design and history, I think they go hand-in-hand for me.

Okay.

Now, finding a lot of these resources can be a little bit challenging.

And because we're looking at historic sources, doesn't mean that we're married to using all of those.

We're just using them to infuse our own design.

Yeah, we want inspiration.

And so -- Yeah, I don't -- There's times that you copy exactly.

And there's other times you, you're just inspired.

And I think you want that, you know, infusion of the past to inspire you, my opinion, if we're doing a built-in for an historic house or an older house, it needs to be inspired.

Yeah.

If you're looking to help your woodworking projects and your built-ins look better and fit in not only with your house, but within elements of the past, you can find some resources.

They're all at our website WoodsmithShop.com.

Thanks, Brent, for stopping in with us.

Yeah, thank you.

More than any other woodworking project, built-in projects for your home offer the most variables and the most ways to customize it.

Every space is going to be a different size.

The styling, the details, the specific layout, are all up to you.

That's why it makes it a little bit more difficult to try and present a project on the show.

But I hope that you've learned from today's episode a little bit of perspective on what you can do to make sure that you get your built-in project off on the right foot, and then learned a couple of techniques that can help you build that project so that it works just the way you want.

Again, remember, plans are at our website WoodsmithShop.com, that will give you some ideas on some built-in projects for your own home.

At the site, you'll find other great ideas, videos, free tips and more.

Just check it out.

And we'll see you right back here in "The Woodsmith Shop."

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week you'll receive an email with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more -- sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith guild edition, with shop projects, plans, tips and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith guild edition and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD, or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters, offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

-And by.

-Kreg.

From the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond wood glues.

the pro's advantage.

And by... ♪♪ ♪♪