With two boys sharing a room, and with no plan to move anytime soon, the only way to gain storage is by going vertical. So when I determined to make a dresser for my son, I new it was going to be a tall one.

In fact, at this point it is probably too tall for him.

I arrived at the final dimensions by starting with his previous dresser (a curbside "rescue+repair") and having my son stand in front of it to see just how tall I could go. I then jiggled those numbers a bit and arrived at the final dimensions of approximately 56-1/2" tall, by 34" wide, by 17" deep.

But please, don't just copy those numbers. During the course of construction I realized that I had made a rather unfortunate mistake. I designed the overall dimensions, but didn't really work through all the secondary dimensions carefully. The result was that the drawer bottoms -- for the large drawers -- needed to be 30-1/2" wide. However, baltic birch comes in 60x60" sheets, and there is NO efficient way to get a 30-1/2" piece out of that! I "solved" that by running a strip of cherry down the middle of each drawer bottom. This gave some reinforcement for such a wide drawer (not sure if it was necessary or not, we'll see) and by dividing the drawer bases into two pieces each a bit less than 15" wide, it was much easier to use the baltic birch efficiently.

Since I have two sons in that room, I had originally intended to make two dressers at once. In that way I might gain some efficiencies by making multiple cuts with the same tool setups. However, I decided that I couldn't do so, since my shop is not big enough to hold two carcasses at once. Boy am I glad I didn't. When I get around to the next dresser, it will be about 1-1/2" narrower!

The drawer fronts are maple. The top and trim are cherry. The side panels are Maple faced veneer-core plywood. The drawers are from 1/2" (actually 12mm) Baltic Birch plywood. For a finish I used Watco brushing lacquer. The drawers are graduated in height. The four top drawers have 5-1/2" tall fronts, and the bottom one has an 8-1/2" tall front.

Any enough of that. Here are the photos...