Day Seven-forty-six: another new beginning

Well, we haven't forgotten about our new project but felt  some urgency to tackle a different one. See, one of us has trouble walking their dirty laundry all the way into the baskets that are in an adjoining room, so we're going to build a hamper and put it closer to the source. In addition to doing our part for good housekeeping, this is an opportunity to work with kentucky coffee tree, the wood we might use for a forthcoming bookshelf project.

We had only a vague idea of the project before going to the neighborhood wood store but did think that it would be nice to have some 2x2 for legs. When we asked about this the woodseller, John, pointed us to some reclaimed redheart that looked intriguing.

The redheart needs some cleaning up, but so did the coffee tree, which had been rough-cut, as you can see.

No worries. That's what power sanders are for. Here's one side done.

With this necessary preparatory work done, it was time to really figure out what we wanted to turn all this wood into. We sketched out a design that was inspired by some we saw online. Here are back-and-white and (approximate) color versions.

With the basic plan and dimensions in hand we started cutting.

• the legs will be 24 inches...the redheart is currently 26 inches and the extra bits will be made into the handle on the lid
• the stiles will be 1x1 and 16 inches high...there will be seven on each side with an inch gap between them...making the sides each 15 inches total
• the 8 top and bottom cross pieces will be 15 inches wide (obviously, see previous point) and 2 inches high...we had initially thought about making them 1x1 as well but the bottom pieces need to be thick enough to attach to the legs and stiles and have a routered channel to hold a piece of 1/2-inch plywood that will be the bottom of the hamper
• the stiles-to-crosses and crosses-to-legs will be attached by pieces of dowel rods, so we have to drill/router holes for them (one at the end of each stile and cross piece, or 72 holes in all)
• the top may be solid or slatted as well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it

After a couple outings we've nearly got all the components needed for the box.

We still need 2 more stiles. These required a little extra work because the wood was about 1/8 wider than an inch. So after running the 16-inch piece through the table saw to make a 1-inch cut, we rotated the piece 90 degrees to shave off that 1/8 of an inch and make them a true 1x1.

And here are the 8 cross pieces. These we decided to leave 1 1/8 inches wide to inset the stiles a bit.

More to come.