Any woodworkers from NYC available to answer a question?

[Gary R Katz]

My daughter lives in Brooklyn and I'm building her a dining room table from an Oregon White Oak that came down off our property. The lumber was air and kiln dried and has been stored in my mostly unheated wood shop. I've built other pieces of furniture with this wood and it has been mostly stable. But I'm concerned about the relative humidity in her apartment. She's in an old building on the 5 floor, has radiators for heat and a room air conditioner for cooling in the summer. Do you have a lot of issues with seasonal expansion/contraction of wood in apartments?
Thanks for your help.

[Chris Padilla]

They aren't issues if you build with wood movement in mind and if you're using a lot of solid woods, even in your fair state of Oregon, you get dry summers and warm/wet winters (although maybe not lately) so I'm sure you've encountered problems if you haven't accounted for movement. Things might be a bit more extreme on the east coast where it is humid pretty much all the time. Build loose and it'll tighten up out there. ;)

[Peter Kelly]

It’s only really extreme hot and humid or cold / dry here for a few months out of the year so movement shouldn’t be too much of an issue. None of the solid wood furniture I’ve made for my apartment here (Manhattan) has warped or distorted noticeably.


The one thing I would caution about is making sure the table will fit through all the door openings around corners, up stairs, etc. It seems that most residential buildings in NYC have any number of awkward passageways and turns to navigate that only really become apparent when you’re moving furniture through them. Don’t ask me how I know this…

[John Vernier]

I had a shop for a while in an old converted factory building in Cincinnati, with fairly aggressive radiator heat. I had moved from Los Angeles so I expected higher humidity in general than I was used to on the west coast (true for the most part), but in fact that shop was drier when the heat was on than I ever experienced in LA, and some pieces I brought with me experienced shrinkage issues in that shop, more than the swelling I had expected. Hopefully your daughter has better control over her heating than I did, but those old radiator systems can be brutal. Maybe you should give your daughter a hygrometer, if that doesn't spoil the bigger gift of the table.

[Michael Moscicki]

For staters, most likely the heat is controlled for the whole building, so she can't micromanage the heat. That being said, while I have yet to build a piece of furniture (tool buying is so adictive), the wood furniture that is in our house hasn't had any issues due to expansion or contraction. Our winters are in the 30's/40's and summers in the 80's/90's. I would imagine you could build it like you would build it Oregon. Not an expert on wood movement, so maybe other people living in the Northeast can chime in.

Oh and chances are her doors are max, 30 inches wide.

[Peter Quinn]

I lived in Manhattan for ten years in old apartments and am now a professional wood worker that services the NYC market. Expect wood movement. Build for it. My steam heated apartment was nose bleed dry in the winter and probably 60% RH in summer, but only for a short period at its worst. It will definetly be a different RH than Oregon (where I also lived for a while). And probably the swing from high to low is greater in the northeast than Pacific Northwest. So don't make any solids captive, gap drawer fronts conservatively, expect those to shrink in winter, probably not grow versus Oregon in summer, but that depends on which part you are in I suppose.

[Gary R Katz]

Thanks guys! This is helpful. I was considering not using breadboard ends with a mortise/tenon setup to allow for movement. I will definitely include them since it's better to be safe than sorry. It will also improve the look of the tabletop to have that border. Peter, that is good advice about getting the table into the apartment. Michael, I'll have my son-in-law check the door width.