Sea Chest

In the past, a sea chest was used by sailors to store their personal property such as clothes and toiletries. Now, I don’t know many lucky ducks who get to spend their lives on boats and need a sea chest, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give yourself the experience of building this fun piece of history. One thing that’s fascinated me about utility pieces of furniture, such as a sea chest, is the no-nonsense construction techniques that are used to build them. And our designer kept with that theme. A solid-wood case is assembled with rabbets, and the tongue and groove bottom is nailed directly to the case. This would make it easy for the sailor to replace the bottom if the slats got wet and started to become compromised. Just because the construction techniques are pure utilitarian, doesn’t mean the inside can’t be user friendly. The inside of the case is broken up with a couple of sliding tills. The till construction, like the case, is pure utility. The tills slide on runners so you have easy access to all of the items stored within. Of course, we couldn’t build a pure utility piece without adding some pizzazz. In this case, we added walnut trim around the bottom and top ends of the chest. In addition, the walnut handle block and rope becket tie everything up in a pretty bow.

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