I made this sliding-top pencil box for our three-year-old goddaughter. It’s all Baltic birch; the sides are half-inch and the top is quarter-inch. I carved the design with my X-Carve, painted the carved area, and then finished the entire box with a spray enamel clearcoat.
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!
In a picture frame, that is! I made this 30″x20″ frame for my wife, who wanted one for our wedding picture in the same style as this smaller frame she found:
The new frame is constructed of 3/4″ Baltic birch plywood. I started by making the sides (each 3″ wide) and cutting a rabbet into the back of each to accept the glass, photo, and backer board, and then I mitered the ends and glued them together into a basic rectangular frame. (There are no photos of this process, so you will have to believe me. You MUST believe me.)
Then I drew the scalloped shape, cut it out with a bandsaw, cut a cove into the edge, and stained it with Varethane’s Kona stain.
This is so the stain can show through on the edges, which I will weather after painting. Speaking of painting:
I gave the frame three coats of semi-gloss white and then roughed up the edges to match the frame it was modeled after:
I used window glazing points to secure the backer board.
And then I hung it on a wall. The end!
Come along with me on a journey; a journey of craftsmanship, cabinets, and canned goods. Observe as I detail the steps I took to build this new cabinet in our kitchen so that we could move all of our food out of the cramped pantry and into the light where it belongs (the light where it belongs).
It all started with a SketchUp drawing:
My wife and I designed this cabinet to take up an entire wall in our kitchen that had previously only been home to a smaller more decorative cabinet that was more suited for display:
A very nice cabinet to be sure, but it was not meeting our needs. The room directly behind the wall the cabinet is on is our pantry, although it also holds the water heater and furnace air handler, so it is awkward to get in and out of. Once the new cabinet is built, we’ll move all of the food into it and use the old pantry for storage that won’t need to be accessed so frequently.
I started by building the box for the drawers. Plywood and pocket holes, nothing unusual here.
The corner cabinets are triangular in order to match the layout of the kitchen; I made them separate from the drawer box so that I’d be able to carry it into the house myself.
The intersection between the corner cabinets and the center drawer box is a 135º angle, so I glued up these pieces for the face frame so it could all be one piece to avoid having seams in the finished piece where the different cabinet boxes meet.
This worked better than I expected it to:
Here you can see the full face frame before I painted it.
I used full extension ball-bearing slides for all the drawers. They’re installed on spacers so that they will clear the edges of the face frame.
Each drawer is just a box held together with lock rabbet joints and a piece of quarter-inch plywood fit into a groove in the bottom. I’m glad I bought a strap clamp for this, although I should have bought more of them so I could glue up more than one drawer at a time.
At this point, all of the drawer boxes are built and installed and are ready for their fronts.
I cut all of the rails and stiles for the drawer faces and cabinet doors at the same time (sixty-eight pieces). They are all 2 1/4″ wide. (Ripping these pieces from larger S3S boards I bought from a lumberyard allowed me to both get the custom size I wanted and saved me about 65% of what I would have paid to buy poplar 1x3s from a big box store.)
I used cope and stick joinery for all of the drawer faces and doors. Here they are all dry-fit before I cut the panels…
…and after being glued together with the panels, which are made of quarter-inch plywood.
I moved the three base cabinets into the house. By this point, I had also painted the insides of the corner cabinets and drilled holes for adjustable shelving. You can also see an outlet that I would later extend into the corner cabinet.
I painted the face frame and all of the drawers before installing them in the house. And it only took forever! I should have used melamine for the drawer boxes; it would have cut way down on painting time, and I would have gotten a better finish.
The base cabinet has an oak countertop to match our kitchen table, garbage cabinet, and shoe cabinet. I made this the usual way.
Time to install the lower cabinet doors!
Oops. It isn’t very useful to have a handle six inches from the ground. I used a very strong magnet and dragged it up to the top of the door.
The upper section of the cabinet is made up of four parts: two corner cabinets, a lower shelving unit, and an upper display cabinet.
The face frame for the upper section was constructed in the same manner as the lower cabinet frame.
After painting and drilling more adjustable shelving holes, I learned how important it is to leave yourself an inch or two of wiggle room. I had designed this cabinet to come within half an inch of the ceiling, but when I began installing it, I found that our ceiling is 3/4″ closer to the floor on one end of the room than it is on the end that I measured on.
Luckily, I was able to make some adjustments and just barely get everything to fit.
I had originally been painting everything in my 8′ x 8′ spray booth, but with so many drawers and shelves to spray, I masked off the front of my shop instead. I used semi-gloss paint and did all of the painting with an HVLP sprayer. By the time I finished this project, I was consistently getting a really nice smooth finish.
The corner cabinet shelves are amputated triangles.
Haha, look at all those triangles.
The very top section of the cabinet is meant to have glass-front doors so we can display some of our very fancy things. This necessitated a different door construction so that I could easily paint the door before inserting the glass. I went with mitered half lap joints, my first time trying them.
I installed the glass doors, and the cabinet was almost done. (There are a lot of 3/4 views of this cabinet because the kitchen light fixture prevents me from taking a full shot from the front.)
After a week-long wait for my moulding order to come in, I added 3 1/2″ baseboard moulding and a 3/4″ cove moulding around the top.
Show ’em what you got, cabinet!
Not content to live in a house with only one barn-style sliding door, I’ve built another over-toilet cabinet
I made a few changes since the last time I made one of these:
Stay tuned for more updates on my bathroom activities!
This is the story of how I turned this:
into this:
and how it only took me 411 days.
It all started when I pried some flagstones out of the hill next to our house. They were sticking out of the grass, and I thought I’d use them for a path somewhere.
As I pulled stones out of the grass, I noticed that there were more stones underneath. My sons and I decided to investigate, so we dug into the hill to see what we could find.
We found lots of rocks — fat rocks, skinny rocks, rocks who climb on rocks.
Some of them looked really interesting too. Lots of colors were represented: tan, gray, slate, blue, red, orange, purple. (Just like the ol’ rainbow acronym: TGSBROP.)
Once we found that there was a seemingly unlimited supply of these stones in our hillside, we decided to make an entire patio out of them. Before my wife could change her mind, I stripped the woodchips from the side of our house in preparation for laying down stones.
I had to move some dirt around to level it and get it down the appropriate height down to allow for space for the sand and gravel foundation.
In other parts of the yard, I had to add dirt to get it up to the correct height. I ordered a load of topsoil and a willing helper.
Some parts of the yard needed to be raised as much as 18 inches, so I set up some guides to let me know when I had the dirt high enough. This didn’t work especially well, but it did work.
Of course, when adding dirt, you need to compact it. I bought a hand tamper from Home Depot and started compacting.
Two days and one case of carpal tunnel syndrome later, I bought a mechanical compacter instead. This allowed me to finish this part of the project before I die due to the heat death of the universe.
Because the edge of the patio would be a foot and a half above grade in some spots, I bought some railroad ties and used them as a retaining wall around the edge.
I secured the bottom run of ties to the dirt with 24″ rebar and the top ties with 12″ galvanized spikes (into the bottom ties).
While I was preparing the site, I was still digging out stones from the hill, and they were getting bigger as I dug deeper.
Some of the larger stones were too heavy to carry up the hill, so I had to either break them in half or pull them up on a makeshift sled.
By Memorial Day (of last year), I had the dirt leveled out and all of the railroad ties installed.
I had a couple of extra railroad ties, so I built a pad for a hot tub we were considering buying.
By this time, I had been mining our hillside for three months and had amassed a sizeable collection of stones. I did a double-take when I noticed I had accidentally arranged them like this:
I ordered a load of gravel and a load of sand. Laying these down on top of the dirt should ensure that water doesn’t pool underneath the stones and cause problems, especially during freezing/thawing times of the year.
I rented a Bobcat to make the chore of moving the gravel and sand a weekend job instead of a rest-of-my-life job.
Well worth the money.
Now that I had the soil leveled and covered with three inches of gravel and two inches of sand, I could start laying the stones down.
As I continued to lay down more stones, the building inspectors stopped by the check my work.
Here’s an overhead view from around the time I stopped working on the patio last fall. As school started up and the weather got colder and rainier, I lost a lot of motivation.
In the spring, I kept digging up stones, and again, they kept getting bigger.
Maybe too big… I broke my shovel trying to pry this one out.
This is the point that I gave up on the idea of covering the entire patio in stone. It was taking far too long to dig up enough stone to cover the entire patio, and I was getting tired of hauling them up the hill.
Plan B: artificial turf. Fake grass has come a long way from the plasticky Brady Bunch sod of my childhood; Costco sells a brand called Pregra that is easily mistaken for real grass once it’s installed.
It came in two 25-foot rolls, which each weighed about a million pounds. I wrestled them over to the patio, unrolled them, and cut them to fit the space.
While the flat grass look is classic, I wanted to try something more reminiscent of the rolling foothills of southern Oregon, but I was overruled.
After cutting the turf, I secured it to the ground with landscaping spikes and then filled the spaces between the stones with Polysweep, a polymeric sand. It’s like sand, but it hardens once it gets wet.
Here’s a better shot of the dried Polysweep and the pad for our fire pit.
The last step for the artificial turf was to add infill to puff up the grass and give it some extra durability. I used four hundred pounds of play sand, and I spread it with a grass seed spreader.
After spreading the sand, I brushed it in with a push broom, and then I wrote a perfect segue into the end of this post.
If you scrolled to the bottom hoping that instead of reading a boring write-up, you could watch a timelapse of the entire process, you’re in luck. Enjoy!
Chickens, they say, are the most industrious of all birds. They are not content to while away the hours just pecking and clucking; they want to be put to work. For this reason, I built for our chickens a chicken tractor.
Unlike its human counterpart, a chicken tractor does not have an engine or even a cupholder. A chicken tractor is a portable chicken coop-like structure that allows the chickens to be transported to different locations around the yard, where they may then eat bugs, scratch at the dirt, and perform other chicken duties.
I began my tractor journey by designing the structure in Sketchup.
It’s essentially a box with a door at one end and a roof with a 5º slope (to match the main coop, of course).
Rather than butt-jointing and toe-screwing all of the boards like in the main coop (what is this, an anatomy lesson??), I decided to try using half-laps for all of the joints.
I found this to be time-consuming. I also found this to create a lot of sawdust.
I made one frame for each side of the tractor and then screwed them all together.
To increase the structure’s rigidity, I added some supports across the top (not shown) and some supports in the lower corners (shown below).
The door fit perfectly (of course) in the taller end.
For the handles and wheel, I took this broken wheelbarrow and chopped it up.
The axle is angled up at about 10º so that the bottom of the wheel just barely touches the ground when the tractor is stationary. Then, when I lift up the handles, the frame of the tractor will be off the ground, engaging the wheel.
I attached the roof panels (extras left over from building the coop), and hardware cloth over the side openings, and voila! A box with a wheel!
The chickens love it! They were all like “Cluck cluck cluck cluck!”
The single wheel idea, while ingenious, did not work out in practice. I had to lift the end of the tractor much higher than I wanted to in order to get clearance under the far end, so I added two wheels, taken from a bike that I’m sure my kids won’t miss probably. This raises the end of the coop up two inches off the ground, but it makes it much more maneuverable. If I ever put chicks in here, I’ll have to add some sort of skirt that prevents them from sneaking out.
Only one more touch was needed to turn this tractor into a home.
Now you might be saying, “Chris, did you build this entire project just so you’d have an excuse to use this chicken knob?” In response to your question, I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wished you could escape from your problems? Well if you had this 8-bit emergency kit, you could grab the hammer, smash your way to a P-Wing, and fly away.
For the uninitiated, the hammer and P-Wing are items from Super Mario Bros. 3., one of the greatest games made for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. The hammer lets Mario break rocks in the map, and the P-Wing allows him to fly for an entire level (but only a single level). It’s a very useful item, but it’s also very rare, so it must be saved for just the right occasion. Let me walk you through how I built this.
Like all good things, this project started with a board of quarter-sawn red oak.
I chopped and sliced the board until I had these six pieces.
I glued two of the longer pieces together to make the back of the box, and I mitered the ends of the rest of the boards for the box sides. I cut a groove (not pictured) in each of the sides to accept the back of the box.
The photo above is a dry fit. Because the box holds the glass (“glass”) front captive, I couldn’t glue it up until the very last step.
I originally made a mushroom out of Perler beads to use as the power-up, but it didn’t seem worthy of emergency use. Nobody was ever psyched about getting a mushroom from a Toad House.
I decided to make a P-Wing out of wood instead. I cut a pixel grid on some oak with my X-Carve and then cut out the P-Wing shape on the bandsaw.
A splash of paint and the P-Wing is done. The P-Wing looks superimposed on this photo because it’s sitting on the top of a bottle, not floating in the air.
I made the hammer head the same way, by carving a grid on the X-Carve and then cutting out the real shape on the bandsaw.
I don’t have any bits that could cut two inches deep, and cutting the edges on the bandsaw resulted in sharper corners.
In order to attach a handle, I cut a 15/16″ hole through the hammer head. Reenactment pictured below.
I filed the top of the hole to flare it out so that the handle would fit better as I pounded the wedges into it. (I also took some liberties and cut a space between the hammer claws, even though it’s not clear from the game that the hammer has separate claws.)
I apparently forgot to take any pictures of the handle-making process, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I used part of a broken broomstick, rounded the ends, cut an X in one end, and then pounded walnut wedges into it to secure the handle in place.
(This video explains the process of using wedges to attach a hammer handle.)
This was my first time successfully making my own wedges for a hammer and my most successful X-shaped wedging.
The last step for the hammer was to coat it with clear enamel. This really made the contrast between the walnut head and the birch (?) handle pop.
I decided to use this project to make a spline-cutting jig and cut splines for the first time. It went better than expected!
The splines are walnut so as to match the hammer.
I originally wanted a vinyl sticker for the “In case of emergency label,” but I don’t have the means to make one, and ordering a single custom sticker from a sign-maker would have been cost-prohibitive. So instead, I cut a little placard on the X-Carve.
To mount the sign and P-Wing inside the box, I used epoxy to affix two more pieces of the aforementioned broomstick. I used epoxy instead of wood glue because this joint involves end-grain, which doesn’t always adhere well with just glue, and I don’t want these joints to fail since there is no way to fix them without breaking in to the box.
You can see in the above picture that at some point, I cut a groove around the top edge of the box to accept the glass front, which is really plexiglass because I was going to be sending this box through the mail and I didn’t trust it to arrive unbroken. So if there is an emergency that merits breaking the glass, you’ll have to hit it really hard.
I mounted the sign and P-Wing to the ends of the broomstick dowels with epoxy as well.
At this point, the bottom two corners of the box are glued together, and the plexiglass front can go in. But first, I needed to figure out how to attach the hammer to the box.
After poking around in my spare parts bin for a minute, I made a simple hook out of two pieces of a wire clothes hanger.
I drilled holes into the bottom of the box and epoxied the hooks in place. I also added a picture-hanging hook, although I’ve been exclusively using 3M Velcro strips to hang things for about three years.
You can see in the above picture that I glued the top on, effectively securing the contents of the box forever. That’s not true, I lied. Instead of using wood glue on the top corners, I used hide glue. Hide glue has the useful property that it can be loosened with heat, so if the box ever does need to be opened for repairs or some nefarious purpose, the owner could heat the top corners with a heat gun or hot water, and the top of the box should come loose.
Here’s a shot of the finished splines and hammer hook.
And a shot of the hammer in place.
And the final product. I sent it to a friend who needed something to jazz up a newly renovated space, and I can only assume that upon hanging it up, he installed a spotlight to showcase it and a velvet rope to protect it.
