Choosing a Wood Finish
If you're unsure about the finish for your chest, we encourage you to order wood samples. Color accuracy on our website cannot be assured due to a number of variables including lighting, the camera used, and the settings on your computer monitor.
Dowry Chest Options
Cedar Chest Lock: Add a lock to your cedar chest. The lock is small and unobtrusive, and is child-safe (it cannot be locked from the inside).
Cedar Chest Trays: Our dowry chest trays are created from solid unfinished red cedar. They ride gently upon a pair of cedar rails built into the interior, and lift out easily to reveal the interior. Click here for a photo. Our chest trays are intended to hold smaller, loose items while the main compartment of the chest holds larger items.
Our cedar trays are available in a variety of sizes, and are built to cover the full depth of the chest.
The craftsman may modify the length if necessary. For example, two 25" trays cannot fit inside of a 48" long chest. In this case, the craftsman would create two trays to cover the full length of the interior.
Chest Casters: Casters allow your chest to roll along the ground, which is a useful feature for our larger cedar chests. The casters are installed prior to shipping, but are removed to prevent damage -- you need to 'pop them in' when the chest arrives . Casters can be set to one of two heights, suitable for use on a carpeted floor or a hardwood floor. Please select the appropriate caster height for the room you will be placing the cedar chest in. Click here for a photo of a caster installed on the bottom of a hope chest.
Finished Rear Panel: Our cedar chests are made with solid hickory hardwood on the front, top and side panels. The bottom and rear of the chest are finished with red cedar. The rear panel generally faces a wall or bed, and is not visble.
When you upgrade to a finished rear panel, the back of the chest is finished to match the rest of the chest (it will be created to match your chest -- whether that be oak, cherry, hickory, etc). Chests with a finished rear panel are slightly deeper than standard cedar chests.
Click here to see a photo of this option on a hope chest.
Chest Interior:
Standard Cedar Lined Chest. Our classic cedar chests come standard with cedar on all four interior walls, and also the bottom of the chest.
Chest With Poplar Panels. This option allows you to have a chest with no cedar in it. We will replace the red cedar rear and bottom panels with poplar. This chest interior will have poplar on the rear and bottom wall of the chest, and hickory on the sides and front of the chest. Poplar is a bit more expensive than cedar, but is a good replacement in terms of strength and durability. We recommend this option for people with cedar allergies.
Padded Chest: Our cedar chests are strong enough to double as a seat (assuming normal use), either by a window or as an extra place to sit in your living room. Our padded chest option makes this a bit more comfortable.
This option consists of a rail to hold the cushion in place, and a cushion in your choice of color. Click here for a photo, shown on a classic cedar chest.
The cushion is handmade by the wives and daughters of our Amish chestmakers, who are experienced in hand sewing and making quilts. The inner padding is made from soft foam. Custom colors are also available (if you're willing to wait a week or two for the cloth samples), these colors depend on locally available cloth materials and vary seasonally.
Custom Sized Cedar Chests
We can also create custom sized chests to nearly any size, including chests up to 80" in length. The price will be roughly proportional to the amount of materials needed to create the chest.
Chests larger than around 50" x 22" x 22" are too large for UPS, and will need to ship via freight service.
