Orphaned Oak
Monks bench or Settle
This is a project that evolved as I progressed through the stages of building it.
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The original concept came when we saw an antique monks bench, that looked something like this:
And then someone gave me an entire kitchen-full of solid oak cupboard door-fronts.
There followed many hours of scraping, to remove all the modern varnish and stain. The curved mouldings were particularly challenging. This took me several weeks, and seemed never-ending.
Until eventually I had a big pile of nice clean oak panels.
I chose three doors to make the front of the settle, and joined them together using tongue and groove joints.
And then formed them into a box with other panels and some sturdy oak corner-posts. The top from an old coffee table provided a good solid bottom for the box.
My wife decided she didn't want arms on it, which meant it was impractical to have a high backrest, so I found some nicely moulded oak edging and made it into a low upstand.
I had a very old elm kitchen tabletop waiting for a purpose, and one half of it made a very good lid. It even had some nice curved moulding around three edges, that worked very well with the design.
And now the final shape is emerging.
Some wrought-iron hinges and a few coats of polish, and voila!
