In the kitchen of the Fitch House at Old Sturbridge Village, a "living history" museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, Norm shows viewers an early American hutch, known in its day as a cupboard (a hutch was for rabbits). Norm returns to his workshop to build his own model, a modified chest of drawers made of knotty pine, featuring a base cabinet with raised panel doors and an open shelf section topped with a decorative crown-molding detail.

Norm demonstrates how to build a slant-top writing desk with tapered legs, a shallow desk drawer and a nest of small drawers and open bins fitted into the top. Constructed mostly of maple.

In the parsonage at Old Sturbridge Village, a "living history" museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, Norm admires a built-in comer cupboard in the house's parlor. Norm's own design for a corner cupboard, constructed back in his workshop from pine and plywood, incorporates a top section closed in with glass-paned doors and a base cabinet with raised panel doors.

Norm travels to the Museum of the Adirondacks near Blue Mountain Lake, New York, to inspect a collection of rustic furniture, including a variety of Adirondack chairs. Extracting the best features from each of these chairs, Norm designs his own version built of cypress, an excellent outdoor wood that needs no preservatives or treatment. A project that relies heavily on the band saw to shade its many curved pieces, the Adirondack chair requires no fancy joinery, it's fastened together exclusively with screws, nails and nuts and bolts.

Norm visits Kingscote, an elegant Gothic Revival house in Newport, Rhode Island, for a look at a mahogany butler's table with four leaves that fold down on solid brass hinges. For his version of this stylish antique, Norm demonstrates the technique of biscuit joinery to glue together the boards for the tray, crafts mortise-and-tenon joints to connect the rails of the base, uses a molding head cutter on his table saw to add a decorative bead to the rails, and shows how to mount the tray's special hinges.