Nightstand Project

Two of the most beautiful pieces of wood I've ever had the pleasure of working with.  These are 11 and 15 inch wide pine slabs.  Looking at them now I wish I'd built a table out of them, but there'll be more pine where that came from.

The problem with a slab this wide is that it's likely to be warped, and I had to sand off almost a half inch from the edges on one side and from the center of the other to flatten it out.  I probably spent 8 hours sanding alone just to get these to a construction stage.

I don't have very many construction pictures, but I ended up using my Dremel tool a lot.   Sadly it wasn't very well suited to the size of the project so I had to find something with a little more power.

As long as you're going in a straight line the circle saw makes an excellent router ;)
The notches are for the shelves to slide into for both stability and looks.  I found, not surprisingly, that it is difficult to get the notch the exact same height as the shelf.  I love the inlayed look though, it's something that I'm going to continue striving for with future projects. 
(If anyone is working on their Christmas list, I could use a router ;)

I saved the best sections for the top shelves.  I probably spent an hour lining the grain up, I wanted the lines from the back plate to match up with the shelves so that it looked like they flowed together.  It worked pretty well considering they were different pieces of wood.  It was difficult because there were always some grain that lined up and some that didn't, I could shift them back and forth by about a 1/4" and had to decide which looked best.

I'm pretty happy with the end result.  I finished it with a wipe-on polyurethane finish, it goes on very easily and doesn't leave any brush marks like I remember seeing in other projects I made many years ago.  Limei is suitably impressed too, I now have permission to commence work on pretty much any wood working projects my heart desires -
pending their usefulness of course ;)