Day Seven-ninety-seven: another one-day project

Necessity is the progenitor of more projects. That may not be how the saying goes but it fits. We had a crying need for a little storage bin to keep near our front door. The things we have there now just don't cut it, mainly because they're too small. What's the solution? Try to build something new.

Step one: Gather all the necessary materials. In our case, we used some scrap .25-inch plywood and some of the excess oak floor boards from when we redid the kitchen.

Step two: Prepare the pieces. We wanted to make the final box 12 x 15 inches and have an invisible bottom, so we cut the plywood to be 11.25 x 14.25 inches, which would recess it a bit from the sides of the box.

A couple of the flooring boards were the right length (14.25 inches in this case), so we just needed to trim off the tongues on the side.

We also cut off the grooves on the four pieces we're using for the base to have the maximum surface area to glue to the plywood.

Step three: Lay out the pieces to fit the design. Each board is 14.25 or 11.25 inches because when you add the width of the boards (.75 inches) then you end up with the desired 12 x 15-inch plan.

The first box told two friends...

And they told two friends. And so on and so on and so on. Well, ok, not quite. We stopped once we had five levels laid out, which makes our box a little more than 10 inches high.

We went with a log cabin style that alternates direction, both for aesthetics and strength.

Step four: You can see in the pictures above that the pieces don't sit right because of the tongues atop the boards. We trimmed off only enough to let the boards lay flat because otherwise we wanted to take advantage of the tongue/groove to connect the levels. Here's the first corner we attached with the bit of the tongue cut off.

We drilled pilot holes (this is hard oak after all) and countersunk the screws somewhat.

After going once around we added a second layer. This time we flipped the corner clamp over to keep the loose pieces in place. Once everything was end screwed in place we put glue between the layers.

Step five: Lather, rinse, repeat until we had the desired height. We cut the top pieces smooth with the table saw.

Steps to come: Sand. Stain. Sand. Stain. Attach bottom.