finish is on 3

Very Nice! Just a collection of . . .  as you describe it, looks pretty intricate. As furniture was built a century ago.

To make it lighter? Hauling up and down six flights of stairs, as people moved from one tenement to another? Save on material? Design feature?

My ExMo has an oak desk built in just this manner. The carcass is 140+ years old, it was cobbled together various times with parts thrown off the buckboard when room was wanted, parts jointeried into an almost-matched ... I'll posess it in a decade or two, by the will of the saints, and do an @aaronc on it.

Tear down, reporpoise, rebuild. <º))))><