Cassidy Creations Hoosier cabinet & Don Perkins rocking chair

After my last post, I put together a second end table to go with the new Bauder-Pine bed.

(The lampshade on the right-side lamp hangs funny. I have to figure out how to straighten it out without breaking the lamp.)

The table kits were a good warm-up for the Hoosier cabinet for the kitchen, which I could tell from the number of pieces was going to be a big undertaking.

I’m calling this a Hoosier cabinet because that’s what it looks like, but the official name of this kit is “Kitchen Cabinet.”

I started identifying all the pieces were and organizing them based on what they were. (Bottom pieces, top pieces, drawer pieces, etc.) This is challenging because the kit doesn’t include a parts list — you have to read through the instructions and hold the pieces up to the diagrams to figure out what’s what.

I didn’t take a bunch of step-by-step pictures, but this kit took several hours of careful work to build. I stained the pieces with a Minwax Golden Oak stain pen before gluing.

The doors and drawers all open, and there are two slide-out cutting boards.

The flour bin has a curved bottom. This is thin veneer that needed to be wet to fit around the curved sides. I used a few dabs of super glue along with tacky glue, then held the piece in place until the super glue cured.

I was worried about the cutting boards getting stuck in the very tight opening so I sanded them a lot. Added bonus: they now look like worn cutting boards!

The one on the left slides out easily. The one on the right is tighter, but I can still get it in and out. As long as the pin heads don’t pull out, I’m not worried about the cutting boards getting stuck in there (famous last words). I might leave the tighter one extended, if I can find some good mid-preparation food to set up there.

Here’s how the cabinet looks in the kitchen.

I’ll fill up the shelves with cups or mixing bowls or something. I have to dig through my stash and see what I have that will look good here.

I still have trim work to do in the bump-out, but I temporarily hung up the Bauder-Pine wall cupboard to see how it’ll look.

It fits nicely in this spot now, but it might be too cramped once the window and the bump-out opening have trim installed. We’ll see.

Since I have the kitchen chairs out, now is a good time to show off this matching rocking chair I recently bought.

When I got the two ladderback chairs, they’d come out of a set of Bauder-Pine furniture, and the seller assumed these were Bauder-Pine as well. When I showed them to Cathy Miller-Vaughan, Bauder Pine’s current owner, she didn’t know who made them. But a month or two later, this rocking chair showed up on her Etsy store, and it looked pretty familiar…

The chair Cathy listed has a maker’s mark — looks like a P.

I asked Cathy if she knew who the maker was and she thinks it’s Don Perkins. Bauder-Pine used to sell his chairs, which explains why they were in that batch of Bauder-Pine kitchen furniture.

My chairs do each have a tiny letter on the underside of one leg. They might be a D and a P (upside-down in this picture), or even two Ps, but it’s hard to tell.

I loved that the rocking chair in Cathy’s store matched my ladderback chairs and was tempted to buy it, but I don’t have anywhere to put it. There’s no room in the kitchen, or anywhere else in the house, really. I do want a rocking chair in the nursery, but this doesn’t seem like a comfortable chair to rock a baby in.

I hemmed and hawed over it, adding it to my cart and then taking it out again. It’s priced fairly for an artisan piece, but $50 is a lot to spend on something I don’t even have a spot for.

Then I stumbled across a listing for a “1:24 scale holiday set.” At $25, this was an easier impulse buy!

The finials on this chair are slightly different, so I wasn’t positive I was getting a chair from the same maker. But when the chair arrived I found the same P underneath one of the arms.

Of course, I still don’t have a good place to put it. Even though it matches these chairs, it’ll probably end up in a different house.