I built this Shaker-style jewelry cabinet for my wife. You’ll never guess what’s inside…

The cabinet box itself is only 1 3/4″ deep. These are the four sides; the top is shorter because it won’t be mitered, since the top of this box will be hidden in the final product.

I cut a rabbet into the back of the sides so that they could accept a quarter-inch piece of plywood for the back of the cabinet.

I love my 90º clamps.

I would love to have more clamps too.

Here’s the main box after being glued up.

I added this half-inch pine board so the hooks (for hanging necklaces) would have something to screw into and to keep the hanging jewelry away from the back of the cabinet.

I painted the interior of the box at this point because it would be very hard to reach with a brush or sprayer after installing the face frame.

I’m not sure why I didn’t install the top board before doing these coats of paint, but I guess I did it at this point.

Here’s the assembled face frame, made of 3/4″ poplar.

I don’t normally fill any of my pocket holes, but I had four plugs that came with my Kreg jig forever ago, and these holes might have been accessible to dust and lint inside the cabinet if I left them open.

I glued and nailed on the face frame and then filled the nail holes:

I then gave it another three coats of white semi-gloss.

I installed the hooks in two rows, with each hook an inch from its neighbor.

And I hung it up in the bathroom while I worked on the door.

The door was built using cope and stick joinery. These are the four sides; I cut the groove and tenons with a dado stack on my table saw. The groove is a half-inch deep and a quarter inch wide, and the tenons are sized to fit perfectly in the groove.

This is how they go together. Pretend that I also took a photo of the door after inserting the plywood panel and gluing it all up and painting it, because I forgot to do that.

This is a jig I 3D printed to help install the hinges. You drill a hole in the hole, and then the hinge fits in there.

I added a handle to the door, and boom: a door with a handle.

See how easily the jewelry hangs from the hooks?

We decided that the cabinet could use a second row of hooks about halfway down, so I made a second row of hooks about halfway down.

Tada!

Our front entryway usually looks something like this:

Those are bins to hold shoes; they’re uncharacteristically empty in this picture, but with as many as seven kids in the house at any given time, they’re usually overflowing (and not nice to look at).

We decided to get a shoe cabinet to keep the shoes (and their smells) hidden. Ikea’s HEMNES shoe cabinet was our top choice:

but it wouldn’t be quite big enough, and it wouldn’t make productive use out of all of the space by the door. I decided instead to build my own custom version of HEMNES.

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My wife requested a cabinet to hang above the toilet in our downstairs bathroom, and she sent me a link to this Shanty 2 Chic design as an example of what she wanted. Usually, I would draw up my own plans, customizing them based on the materials I have and the space I’m filling. This time, I decided to just follow the S2C plans exactly since the size was just right for our bathroom.

I don’t have a lot of build pictures, but apart from using half-inch plywood for the carcass instead of 1x dimensional lumber, my build looked the same as the Shanty 2 Chic tutorial.

All of the non-plywood wood is 3/4″ pine.

Instead of buying the same custom hardware kit that Shanty 2 Chic used ($125), I bought this set of barn door rollers on Amazon for $28.

The rollers didn’t come with a rail to roll on, so I made my own by resawing a 1×2 down to a little less than 3/8″ wide and painting it with an oil-rubbed bronze paint that matched the rollers’ finish pretty closely.

The door is five 1x4s joined together with biscuits and glue. The stain is Varethane’s Kona, and the paint is Glidden’s Creamy, the same scheme as our kitchen table and garbage cabinet.

To prevent the rollers from slipping off the end of the rail, I 3D-printed some endcaps for the rail:

You can also see one of the spacers I printed to hold the rail away from the cabinet since the roller needs about an inch of clearance from the face of the cabinet. The spacers were just cubes with a void for the bolt to pass through.

I could have cut them out of wood, but it was handy to be able to print the exact right size without any fuss.

After taking the bathroom door off so I could get the cabinet inside, I hung it above the toilet with care, in hopes that extra toilet paper rolls soon would be there.

We just moved into a new house, and the 20-year-old signpost is showing its age. It had deteriorated at the bottom, so it was no longer set in a hole and was just leaning against a tree.  I decided to restore it and make use of a gift that the previous homeowners had left us.

Here it is on my workbench awaiting some TLC.

I planed the hanging board and the vertical post to clean up the faces. The horizontal post fell apart in my hands when I removed the bolts, so it went in the trash.

Here are the post and hanging board after being planed on each side.

I used the wood from the old vertical post to make the new horizontal post (since the bottom 18″ was unusable, it wasn’t long enough to be reused vertically). I found an abandoned 10′ post in the backyard, so I recycled it into the new vertical post for the sign.

I cut a lap joint in the post and sanded off all of the old paint. Here’s a before/after shot (taken with Reenact, of course).

Here’s a shot of the lap joint in the horizontal post after I added some spar urethane to both posts.

One last dry-fit before final construction:

I chamfered the edges of all of the posts on the miter saw to match the original; this should help prevent water from soaking into the top of the vertical post, and it looks nice too.

I removed all of the rust from the chain and eye bolts using a vinegar/salt solution followed by a water/baking soda solution. It worked way better than I expected.

If I had known how well the rust removal would go, I wouldn’t have bought new bolts to join the posts.

Chains attached.

The previous owners of the home had bought some ceramic house-number tiles in Italy but had never been able to put them up. Rather than just gluing them to the wood, I wanted a method that would be reversible if I didn’t like the result or if I made a mistake, so I designed and printed some hold-down clips to attached the tiles to the hanging board.

It was tight getting the tiny little galvanized nails tacked in without chipping the tiles, but half an hour with a nail set (actually a bolt with a concave point, since I couldn’t find my nail set) did the trick.  There is some space between the tiles and clips to allow for wood movement.

I hung the numbers up and trekked down the hill to plant the post.

Tada! Now the UPS driver will know where to bring our Amazon orders.