This a Shaker classic (like Christian Becksvoort's) with a twist: a drawer within a drawer.

The inspiration came while visiting Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire. The Garden Barn has nested a smaller door within the larger doors.

I like to imagine the Shakers would have approved of doing the same in a drawer—which mimics the whimsy they’re known for. The small drawer lets you grab small items quickly.

I have personally never seen a nested drawer like this, and soon came to realize this hand-tool project comprises a fun little challenge: Grain-matching the drawer fronts.

Grain-Matching the Drawerette: Three Approaches

I started with the drawer fronts. To match the grain of the small drawer or “drawerette,” you can take 3 different approaches. These approaches are also useful for matching any drawer to its housing apron or rails.

The Dissection Approach

Starting with a single board, carefully dissect the drawerette from the drawer front.

This can be unforgiving because you want to end up with a minimal reveal around the drawerette, meaning you only have room for drilling a small starter hole, and a saw with a very thin kerf.

The Rip Approach

Rip the drawer plank into 3 horizontal strips (5 if you are also matching the rails), then cross-cut a drawerette opening from the middle strip.

Finally, glue the remaining pieces to form an opening around the drawerette.

The Veneer Approach

This is similar to the rip option, but it doesn’t require you to start from a single board. Glue up a drawer front by laminating the different parts of the drawer such that you end up with an opening where the drawette will be. Now, after placing a drawerette front inside it’s opening, apply a ⅛” veneer to the entire board. Then separate the drawerette’s veneer by guiding a retractable hobby knife from the backside of the drawer front through the drawerette reveal and slicing through the veneer.

In addition to letting you start from mismatched boards, this approach has the benefit of letting you cut simpler through-dovetails rather than half-blind dovetails since the veneer acts as your drawer front (serving as the webbing that closes the dovetails).

I used the rip method. Be careful with this approach as the amount of work invested in the drawer fronts increases with each step (if you miscut a dovetail on the drawerette, you may have to redo the entire front drawer and apron!).

As an aside, if you decide to also grain-match the drawer to it’s rails (and the rails to the rest of the table’s apron), you’ll need to start from a large board like shown below.

Layout & Dovetailing

To start, lay out the location of the drawerette and the main drawer’s knob. How you do this depends on your sense of visual design.

The drawerette should slide over the big drawer’s bottom. I like to slide drawer bottoms into a groove in the front of drawers, so I had to plow this groove in the bottom part of the big drawer’s front (below the drawerette).

Once your layout is ready, precisely rip the bottom, middle and top (the more wood you remove here, the less continuous your grain matching will be). From the middle, carefully cross-cut the drawerette with a fine dovetail saw (you want to keep the reveal of the drawerette as small as possible). At this point, I stickered the pieces and worked on the rest of the table to give the rips time to settle.

Once the boards do whatever warping they’ll do, joint the edges. Then glue everything back together (except for the drawerette!).

At this point, I placed the drawerette inside its opening and planed everything to final thickness. Now take the drawerette out and plow a groove for the drawer bottom. Cut the half-blind dovetails. (I put the drawerette and a tightening shim back in when chiseling the dovetails near the drawerette because it provides support to prevent splitting this fragile little bit of end-grain.)

After making the actual drawerette, the second challenge is designing and fitting a divider for the drawerette. In addition to preventing the big drawer’s contents from blocking movement of the drawerette, the divider also stops the drawerette’s left-right movement and serves as a drawer stop. If you locate your drawerette just inside the big drawer’s side, you only need a 2-walled divider. I didn’t like where that situated the drawerette, which meant I needed to make a 3-walled divider. I used through-dovetails in the same secondary wood as the big drawer’s sides, back and bottom: poplar.

At this point, you can complete the rest of the table’s frame, top and legs.

The divider is similar to a chest’s till, and again, you have a few options for mounting it: you can fix the divider to any combination of the big drawer’s bottom, front, back, or side--of course, it all depends on the location and size of your drawerette. I attached the divider to the drawer bottom. It’s easy to replace if you make a mistake and it means your divider will move with your drawer bottom if its made of solid wood. Because my drawer was shallow, I could have just glued it down but decided to use two brass screws to match the screws that keep the drawer bottom in place.

To layout the divider, place it on the drawer bottom (while it’s in the drawer), and push the assembled drawerette through. Now place the divider around the drawerette, and while holding it steady, remove the drawerette and using a fine pencil mark the inside and outside of each side on the drawer bottom. Doing it near the front will best account for wood movement.

Now find the center of each marking and drill a hole. Drive screws through each hole so they just protrude. Now put everything back together like you did for the layout, but this time press the divider down onto the protruding screws to mark where to drill pilot holes. Drill them, and then finish driving the screws into the divider.

You could buy two Shaker knobs, but to get the proportions right, you need to turn your own on a lathe or drill press.

Drill through the big drawer's front and mount its knob with a washer head screw. For the small knob, it’s safer to super glue or tenon it in as a screw might split the tiny knob. Apply some finish and enjoy!