Hi Waymom,
I do quite a bit of furniture building as kind of a side job but I'm not a professional. I love using cherry (I used it for my kitchen cabinets) and plywood is the best choice for anything wider than a foot or so, where movement might be an issue. By movement I mean seasonal changes that cause the wood to expand or contract across the grain. Cherry averages about 1/8" of movement across a 12" wide board here in the northeast (upstate NY). I built a desk for my kitchen using cherry ply and trimmed the edges with solid cherry. No movement at all and it looks like solid wood. A 4x8 sheet of ply veneered on 2 sides will cost the same as buying 32 board feet of cherry and it's alot less work to use. No gluing boards, scraping and sanding, etc. Regarding strength, plywood will offer about the same as solid wood. As you can tell, I'm a fan of ply and I've used alot of both. I hope all this helped a little, good luck! John

What about particle board with cherry veneer? Is it sturdy?

waymom,
What teacher778 said about wood movement is true, that plywood won't expand/contract as much as solid wood, but if the furniture is built with solid wood then the person building it SHOULD take the wood movement into account and design it to accomodate it. If he doesn't, then he shouldn't be building furniture. I wouldn't make the plywood/solid wood choice based on stability in this case.

As far as which will last longer (solid vs. ply), it depends on the abuse it will take and how it is built. If it is ply, as teacher778 said before, the edges of the ply really need to be protected well to prevent the chipping that you talked about. And any damage to the thin veneer on the plywood will be difficult to repair in the future. Having said that, I've built plenty of furniture using plywood including several bookcases (I am a professional custom furniture maker), properly protecting the edges of the ply, and it has held up well for years. It all has to do with how the piece is designed, which is up to the person building it.

Solid wood would be very nice, but it's going to also be very expensive. The wood may or may not be more expensive than the plywood, but as teacher778 said, there's a LOT more labor involved in using solid wood vs. plywood. The solid wood has to be jointed, planed, glued up, scraped, planed, sanded, then you're at the point that you would be if you'd started with plywood.

The strength of the shelves holding books is more a function of the construction (which takes into account the material being used) rather than whether the shelves are ply or solid. If they are wide shelves, there are things that need to be done to keep them from sagging whether they are made out of ply or solid wood.

One other thing about plywood and solid wood, and this comes from direct experience from a recent (large) project using cherry plywood and solid wood: Often, the plywood and solid wood do not take a finish the same. Sometimes the plywood parts will naturally be a different shade than the solid wood parts. If you then put on a coat of lacquer or something, the two different materials may LOOK like different materials. That's something that the person doing the finishing needs to take into account. They may need to do some test boards. Personally, that's one thing that I'd be very curious about. Ask the person building it for a finish sample of the two materials to make sure they blend well.

What is the desired material to use for a window seat (fron the durability perspective)?

I would stay (far) away from particleboard for use in furniture. Its performance is pretty poor.

For a window seat, plywood would be ok for panels and carcase construction, as long as the high wear areas were solid wood.

All good advice. Particle board (better quality stuff) works okay for kitchen cabinets because it's got good compressive strength and the vertical sides of the cabinets bear the weight of the countertop. It's a lousy tension material, though, so bad for shelves, and especially bad for a window seat where moisture could be an issue.

Both solid wood and plywood are good materials, and I would bet that your furniture will employ both. Find a woodworker who does consistently nice work, and make sure you thoroughly discuss what you want.

Well....how about my solid cherry dressers....48 years old....don't notice any movement....
Or how about those 2 drop leaf tables with the solid walnut planks?, or the round topped solid cherry table in the solarium? Or the cherry side board??
Or the old cherry cupboards( built about 1930) that my friend refinished and had another built to match when they expanded the kitchen?
If you can afford it....go with the real thing.
Linda C

I entirely agree with lindac...if you can afford the solid wood, go for it.

lindac, your solid wood furniture does expand and contract with changes in relative humidity (I guess, theoretically, if your home is a perfectly consistent atmosphere, then maybe it doesn't expand and contract!). You may not notice it, though. Most likely, your furniture is well made and well designed to take into account those movements (frame and panel doors, for instance, take wood expansion and contraction into account...the panel is allowed to float, i.e. not glued in place, in the frame. That way, as the humidity changes, the panel can expand without restriction). One of the rules of thumb that I was taught was to allow 1/8" for every 8" width of wood. But of course, all woods move differently, and there are tables that list the amount each species moves (Understanding Wood by Bruce Hoadley is a great reference book). Your round solid top cherry table probably has all the planks running in the same direction. As an experiment, measure across the table (i.e. across all of the planks, not along their length) every 2 months and compare the measurement. If it's a sizable table, say 48" diameter, I'm going to guess that the measurements vary by about 3/4". Just a guess based on that rule of thumb I mentioned. But it's very slow and you don't really notice it. Now, if you took a board and glued it across the entire bottom of that table in the summer, there's a very good chance that it would crack in the winter. Because the wood would be restriced from contracting.

Linda, just because you don't see the movement doesn't mean it's not happening. It just means that the furniture was well-designed so that the movement doesn't cause damage. There's plenty of "real" solid wood furniture built by people who don't understand it, panesls splitting, perennially loose-jointed and unfixable.

Bookcases are actually simple to build correctly for wood movement. If the grain on the sides and shelves all runs the same way (and it typically does) the entire unit expends and contracts with no problems.
Trouble shows up when you try top attach trim to the top of the unit. The piece on the top is fine, but the pieces on the sides are across the grain if the sides and need to be slip mounted at the back to allow for movement.
Most furniture older furniture carcasses are correctly made and allow for movement of the drawer runners across the sides.
The stuff built incorrectly broke up years ago and is gone.
The good stuff will last about forever.

I am not saying it's not happening....but I am saying that it is possible not to have than "movement" mess up your project.
For example I have an antique square oak table....solid....wide planks....with an apron squarely screwed onto the top. Well one of the boards has split ( of course!) and I took it to have someone pull it togehter and glue it. He said he couldn't because of the apron!!...I didn't explain he should remove the apron and perhaps shorten it a bit and put it back after the glue dried....I figured he was the expert!! NOT!
I also have a stack of one piece turned wooden bowls....not round any longer.
But I do wonder why the tops of solid plank tables don't split more often than they do....
Linda C

Thanks everyone for all your comments!!! Now, do any of you know a good woodworker in the Boston area?

All-solid construction will be very expensive, not just for the materials but also due to labor. I'd go with a combination of plywood and solid. For the bookshelf, use cherry ply for the carcass and shelves, but with a solid wood face frame on both carcass and shelves. If the shelves are going to be wide, then you'll want a pretty thick solid wood edge.

I'd do the same thing for the desk, except if you can afford to do the top in solid wood you should consider it. Plywood tends to dent easily and if you press hard when writing you'll get dents in a desktop made of plywood.

"But I do wonder why the tops of solid plank tables don't split more often than they do.... "

They are not fastened in a way to restrict the movement of the top.
There are metal 'clips' that attah to the bottom of the top and ride in grooves on the inside of the apron, 'Figure 8' (AKA 'double washer', and a lot of other names) that are fastened with 2 screws and allowed to twist slightly to allow movement, blocks of wood fastned to the underside f the top that ride in grooves in the apron (wood version of the metal clips), expanding tables with leaves just push part way open, and some others I cannot even remember at the moment.
All these methods allow a large top (it moves as a single board) to move on the apron while remaining tightly attached.
Wood does not move appreicably along the grain, but changes dimensiomn perpendicular to the grain.
Chapter 3 of the Wood Engineering Handbook by the Forest Products Lab of USDA has a detailed explanation of wood movement (including an 'end view' of a tree showing how the wood changes shape). The book is online for free.

my feeling is that solid is definitely nicer looking and feeling. if plywood gets dented or gouged, it looks junky. my mother-in-law has a very nicely made walnut veneered plywood bookcase and it's held up beautifully for 40 years. but she's got one of those houses that kids don't touch anything in. for your desktop at least, i'd definitely go with solid cherry. the sheen on solid wood has a depth that's imcomparible with veneer.

one more opinionated thought: don't stain it. cherry is gorgeous on its own with a clear finish. IMO, staining cherry just muddies it.

"...staining cherry just muddies it."

Use aniline dye if you want to try and alter the color of cherry. Just be aware the grain is often uneven and can produce a blotchy appearance if stained without correct preparation. A was coat of 2 pound cut shellac works well to even out the dye absorption. It is applied, allowed to dry, then lightly sanded. The dye goes on next.

Cherry was called "American Mahagony" by the colonials, because it had such a wonderful color worked without splintering and there were so many cherry trees and the grain was so beautiful and even.
I don't know what is being used for cherry nowdays, but it's not like the old stuff.
It's much the same with walnut. I have several antique pieces with boards an inch thick and at least 24 inches wide. But anymore, large trees are sold to Japanese to be shaved into less than paper thin sheets and used for trim facing on electronic equipment....and pay big bucks for a tall straight tree!
I do know several farmers who have some old wide walnut boards carefully stored in their barn because they know they will never again be able to get any more.
I love solid wood!
Linda C

Hi again everybody. Many folks out here are suggesting to use poplar for the cost. What is the difference between poplar and plywood? Forgive me for my ignorance.

Thanks in advance.

"What is the difference between poplar and plywood?"

That's a little like asking about the difference between flour and cake. Poplar is a species of tree, like cherry or oak. When someone suggests you make something of poplar, they're suggesting you use the wood in it's simplist form, as lumber that has been sawn from the tree, dried and machined flat and straight. Plywood is a sandwich of several thin layers of solid wood, glued together to form a sheet.

Thanks for the clarification. Which is better for durability? The bookshelf would be painted.

Are you asking which is better for only the bookshelf, or are you also asking about the desk that this thread started with?

Poplar should be fine for the bookshelf, since you're painting it; it has a greenish cast that isn't so attractive when finished clear. I wouldn't use it for a desktop, because it's soft and would dent easily under the pressure of a ball-point pen.

Neither solid wood nor plywood is inherently superior in all contexts.

Do a search for 'Sagulator' before deciding on shlef material.
Edging shelve with even 1x2 material (2 inch vertical) makes them much stiffer and can nearly eliminate visible sag.