With the fireplace part of the Federal fireplace wall kit mostly done, I hinged the doors. I’d been putting this off for a while since hinges are intimidating (not to mention twelve of them!), and the hinges that came wit this kit were extra daunting since the hinges themselves had to be assembled.

The kit came with two packs of Realife flush hinges (a brand that’s no longer available). Each hinge has two pieces that need to be joined together with a hinge pin. Once the hinge pin is inserted, it gets cut down with wire snips. Just putting together the twelve hinges took at least an hour.

On to the hinging. I did my best to keep them straight and aligned with each other. I did the full height cabinet on the left and the taller cabinet on the right first.

Then I set the small doors in place, flush with the bottom. This leaves a gap between the upper and lower doors.

This kit started out as a huge jumble of wood pieces, with no parts list to help identify them. As I neared completion, I was left with a 3/32″ x 3/32″ x 1 3/4″ piece that wasn’t marked on any of the diagrams. Here’s what the instructions said about it:

Glue the 3/32″ sq. pc. to the front edge of the middle shelf on the right side, even with the top.

First of all, the instructions referring to it as a square threw me off, since the piece in question is actually a long skinny stick. Second of all… wtf? I’m pretty good with the English language, but I read this sentence over and over and just could not figure out what it meant.

Because the small doors come up just to the bottom of the shelf above, there’s nothing to block them from getting pushed in too far. This isn’t a problem for the other cabinets, which have shelves behind the doors. I decided the mystery piece should be glued to the bottom of the shelf, flush with the front edge, which could maybe(?) be interpreted as “even with the top.”

(Note that this is the bottom shelf, not the middle shelf. The middle shelf is scalloped, so gluing anything to or under the front edge of that shelf, “even with the top,” would have been impossible.)

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Last month I posted about the Bauder Pine Mansard Victorian, which I’m planning to furnish with lots of Cassidy Creations kits. Right after that, I got to work on the Cassidy Creations Federal fireplace wall, and I’ve been working on it ever since. This is a complicated kit, and probably one I should have worked up to!

This picture from a 1986 Nutshell News article about Bauder Pine shows a completed Federal fireplace wall.

Here’s the picture that comes with the kit.

And here’s the kit itself. Whoa, that’s a lot of unlabeled pieces!

I bought this at a flea market several years ago. Besides the picture in Nutshell News, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one finished. My plan was to build this for the Mansard Victorian’s living room, and put a false staircase behind it leading up to the second floor.

The kit doesn’t have a parts list, so the only way to figure out what’s what is to lay out the pieces on the diagrams. The instructions are pretty bare bones as well. Not for the faint of heart.

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