Primitive Cabinet restoration

I’m restoring a primitive cabinet that my father started to work on some time in the mid to late 1980’s.  It appears to have a cherry front with the rest made from rough cut material, mostly from Montgomery Ward shipping crates.  The entire cabinet is nailed together, using wire nails, which means it had to be built after 1880.

I found an old receipt buried inside dated from the 1930’s.  The cabinet may have been in a store of some kind, it has 12 small drawers in the top cabinet.  It originally had 2 glass doors, but one was missing.  One of the base-cabinet drawers was also missing.  I’ve managed to duplicate the cabinet door down to the joinery, although my replacement will have tighter joints and no saw marks.  Repairing or reproducing pieces with the same roughness and material thickness has been very difficult.  Luckily my step-father happened to find a thick piece of cherry that we planed to the correct thickness for the drawer front and door parts.  I re-sawed some 3/4″ thick pine recovered from a desk I built around 1984 to make the drawer bottom.  I can’t duplicate the crate material or roughness, but I can duplicate the construction.  Minwax early-American stain seems to be reasonably close to the aged pine color, and seems to darken the cherry to about the right shade also.

The original door hinges were much too small, and the cabinet and the one remaining door were both badly damaged by the hinges.  Pieces were broken out and missing.  I was able to mill out a portion of one door stile to repair it, and a small patch in the top-cabinet.

When it is all done, it will be as good as or better than when it was new, while retaining as much of the original character as possible.

1938 receipt