Tear down

The cupboard at the top of the cabinet was fairly straightforward to make. I needed to fix a brace to the wall to support the right side. This will carry the hinges for the door, so it needs to be stiffer than the left side. I will fix the top with screws into the left side because the top is high enough for the screw heads not to show. 

I would show a photo of all of this, but I took the whole cabinet apart before I realised I hadn't taken a picture.

Every flat board now has a hole in the back right corner so cables can be pulled through. When the cabinet is fully assembled the right end will be fully enclosed, so threading cables will need a helping hand. I think I'll put a drawstring through, fixed to a screw at the top to assist.

Now the cabinet is in bits I'll fill where needed, sand everything and prime everywhere. This will take a while, mostly waiting for the paint to dry. Then I'll assemble everything fixing to the the wall battens properly for the first time. Then the small cover pieces need pinning in place, the pin holes and edges filled and then everything will get undercoat then finally a coat of gloss.

Big Fingers

The next layer of the hall cabinet is a couple of open cubby holes. The left end will be a joint between a vertical and horizontal board. I could put a batten in the joint to make it strong, but it would look ugly. I wondered if a finger joint would work. I want vertical board to support the horizontal board and the horizontal board to stop the vertical board moving away from the joint. I cut the joint with the router to get the depth of the cut to exactly match the thickness of the board and to make clean, straight edges.

The top board is again supported by a batten against the wall so it will be anchored and the weight distributed. The joint will still be important. One key point of a finger joint is that it has a large surface area for glue to hold it together. My joint will have a very small area for glue as the fingers are very wide, so I may add some panel pins to improve the strength of the joint. They will be easy to hide under filler and paint. I'll decide at final assembly time.

The cubby holes will be too long and stuff will get lost at the back, so I'm going to add a false back to shorten the space. The assembled section looks how I want it to look. If you open the picture below to zoom in, you can see the finger joint, still unglued and unpinned. It will work well I think. The false back will be fixed to the battens you can see in the two cubby holes.

The last section is a cupboard above the cubby holes. Once that is done there's a few fiddly bits to complete, like the boxed in sections at the right end. Then the whole thing comes apart and is sanded and primed before the final assembly begins.

Somewhere to keep your drawers

Now the drawers are made I know the size and shape of the space they should occupy. I carefully measured the shelf to go above the drawers and cut a 45 degree angle so it will fit under the slope of the stairs. A batten against each wall will support it. I then needed supports for the drawer sliders. These will fix the two shelves together adding extra stiffness and strength. The whole affair was a bit fiddly but finally I fitted the shelf supports and the shelf only to find a bit of a gap between the stair slope and the shelf. The shelf is going to be painted, so the gap will fill with caulk, but it's still annoying. I must remember that walls are not square. I hid the problem in the photo, it's too annoying to show the world.

Some of the pieces are screwed together to make it stay put, but the shelves are not screwed to the wall yet and they are not fully joined to each other yet either. The whole thing will need to be taken apart to sand and prime before it goes together more permanently. 

I'm going to use screws in hidden places. For example, the bottom shelf is covered by the drawers and the top shelf, so I can add screws anywhere to fix it to the wall. The whole right end will be boxed-in as a cable tidy, so any fixing there will be hidden, but the top shelf will be partly exposed, so fixings there need to be in the right place. The next level will be open at the front, but will have a small boxed-in section so that will hide screws at the back of te top shelf. I'm not sure how to fix the two sections together yet, which is another example of poor planning or a dynamic approach to building depending on your point of view.

Drawers

The hall cabinet will hold all kinds of stuff and some of it would be best in drawers, so I included two drawers in the design. I decided to build the whole thing from plywood, but that's not turned out well for the drawers.

I thought making wooden drawer runners to work with plywood would be tricky, so I bought some drawer slides from Eurofit Direct. They are probably overkill but they work very well. I was very happy with Eurofit's delivery and cost but I received an unsolicited email from a recommendation company asking how I would rate Eurofit. I'm never happy with personal details being shared around other parties.

I thought I would build the drawers by making a box with dovetail joints on the front of the box and tongue-and-groove joints at the back. The front takes more strain as everytime the drawer is opened the weight of the drawer and its contents resists the pull on the front face. Dovetails are very strong so are widely used to join the drawer front to the sides. The bottom of the drawer will be 3mm ply fitted into a groove cut around all the sides of the box. To finish the drawer there will be a front panel screwed to the front of the box that will project around the sides, top and bottom. This will disguise the sliders when the drawer is closed.  The, yet to be bought, handle fixes to the front panel.

My attempts to make a plywood box with the joints cut failed badly. The plywood split and broke in various ways so I gave up. Instead I turned to some softwood that I already had and fashioned some drawers from that. It is rather chunky, well actually really rather too thick, but I now have two drawers. 

I cut the dovetails by hand. I have a router and a router table, but no dovetail jig. I came across a way of cutting the pins with a wooden jig on the router table and a straight cutting router bit, leaving the tails to be cut out by hand or with a band saw. I don't have a band saw (it's on my wish list) so I would still need to either cut the waste from the tails with chisel or saw it out with a coping saw. The boards are chunky (really thick) so I opted for a coping saw and finish with a chisel. 

The tongue-and-groove was easy with the router and the groove to hold the base was also easy with the router.  I also used the router to round over the top edge of the drawers. I'm happy with them so far.

Now I need to stain the drawers and build the frames to support them, including the top shelf. Then I think I'll see real progress.

The first cut

I worked out how much wood was needed and it meant two sheets of plywood. They were delivered and I set about cutting the first shelf from the sheet.

The sheets are 2440 x 1220mm which is close to the old 8 x 4 ft sheets. I cut the shelf with a circular saw, propping up the sheet so I didn't cut the floor too. As I expected, the walls were not quite square so I had to trim the shelf a little. I fixed battens to block walls which are very strong. Under the stairs there is a thick wooden brace which is part of the staircase behind the plaster, which was a great way to fix that batten. To help prevent the shelf sagging I fixed a brace under the middle of the shelf along its length, which I notched into the end battens. I'm not sure if the shelf will sag, as it will be fixed to the shelf above too between the drawers, but I thought it was worth adding the extra strength.

I think the next job will be to make the drawers then I can position the top shelf at the best spacing based on the drawer size. I'm not working to the plan exactly, it is just a guide.

A scribble

I thought that making better use of the awkward space under the stairs needed a plan. Here's a photo of the space, it's not huge but is qualifies as awkward. The clock is not a vital part of the layout.

An awkward space

I measured up the various dimensions and sketched a few ideas. Here's the sketch plan I ended up with. 

A sketched plan 

I decided not to fill all of the space, but to create a stepped space. At the bottom will be a pair of drawers sandwiched between two shelves. The shelves will both be fixed to the walls and make a strong base to help support the rest of the build. Above the drawers there will be two spaces to stuff things like scarves, gloves and hats into. Above that there will be a cupboard with one or two shelves in it. This will leave three open spaces. On the top one there will be space to stand the internet router. This will need cables to be guided up there, preferably without them dangling or getting tangled so there's a boxed-in space at the tall end to pull cables through. The drawers and stuff spaces will not be full depth, so there will be room for cables behind them too. 

I'm going to build it from 12mm plywood. I'm not sure about the drawers yet, except that I'll use metal runners that extend to support them. These will be hidden behind drawer fronts, which are not shown. 

I think calling this a plan sounds as though it is how it will be built. I think it is a really a scribbled group of ideas that might turn out quite differently. Let's see what happens.