My wife’s pandemic hobby has been to renew her passion for drawing. She hadn’t drawn seriously since she was a kid so we had no supplies. Soon she had lots of supplies but nowhere to keep them, so I decided to make her something.
This is intended to be a well-used utility box so I intentionally left it a bit rough. The interior is only lightly sanded and some glue joints are visible. The idea here being to discourage the tendency with well-finished boxes to worry about scuffs and scratches. I did sand the outside well, down to 800 grit, then applied a simple paste wax finish.
The box design was from one of the parametric box calculator web sites. (Sorry, I forget which one.) You plug in length, width, height and some detail of the tab size for the joints. There are a total of 4 open-top boxes here:
- The bottom
- The liner and divider in the bottom
- The tray
- The lid
I also learned enough Inkscape to design the center divider for the top tray with a cut-out handle.
Last year I lined our master bedroom closet in cedar and had some leftover planks. These are 1/4" thick tongue-and-groove strips sold in 15 sq ft packs. The box width and height is just small enough to fit the cut outline into one of those strips.
The look of the box is far better then the small amount of work I put into finishing it deserves. When I make pens or bowls on the lathe the finishing is the bulk of the work and in this case it was the least part of the project but the result is beautiful.
Looks great, any plans on adding a handle eventually, or do you think this will be its final form?