I have worked with wood before, but have never had the opportunity to use the array of tools provided to me during this project, such as the router, planer, jointer and miter saw. For that reason, I was very excited to see how much better this final product would turn out than previous projects I had made only with the aid of a jigsaw, hand saw and cheap plywood.

Yuka and I began by cutting our wood into the specified dimensions. We decided that we would start by following the beginner dimensions and diverge if we wanted to/had any other ideas. Using the miter saw was much easier than using a jigsaw, and all of our cuts came out very cleanly. We were a bit confused on the amount of kerf we expected from this saw, so several of our planks initially varied in length by about 1/8″.

Our next session took about three hours. We began by running all of our wood through the jointer and planer. This helped move many major imperfections on the surface of the wood and made the corners more square for our next step, which was screwing together our three frames.

Yuka drilling a pilot hole into a frame.

Me holding one of our finished frames!

The only slight hiccup involved me accidentally screwing two sides together in the wrong orientation, which I easily corrected by removing the screws. The resulting empty screw-holes all but disappear in the final product.

Yuka and I met again a few days later to put our box fully together. This took about 2.5 hours, as we also had to route the sides of our frames before attaching them to anything. We carefully routed all edges of our cut planks, with the exception of the narrow vertical heights of our frames (the screws would have been in the way). We then began the process of assembly.

When fitting our three floor planks into our bottom frame, we quickly noticed that 2 out of the 3 were fractions of an inch too long. We used the orbital sander with a low grit sandpaper to shorten these to a perfect fit. Yuka and I quickly discovered that the easiest method of attaching the floor and the supports would result in a lot of visible screws on the outside of the box. As neither of us knew how to use the kreg jig, and did not think it was feasible to screw our frames in from the inside, we decided to simply deal with it and see how it looked. The completed box before post processing is pictured below. If you look closely, you can see that 2 of the 4 supports are a bit taller than the top frame.

All that was left now was to sand and paint our box. I personally find sanding very satisfying, so I volunteered to come in and begin the process. I again used the orbital sander with low grade sandpaper to shorten the two posts that were slightly higher than our top frame. From there, I sanded all four sides with increasingly higher grits – 120, 240, 320, and finally ~400.

Yuka had the idea to paint our box with a space theme, so she was able to take care of a lot of that while I was at a frisbee tournament. The beginning of the spray painting (the part I was present for) was rough, but in the end, after several coats, it came out great!

Cost estimate:

Two 8′ x 1″ x 4″ planks: 2*$3.38 = $6.76 (Lowes)

One 8′ x 2″ x 2″ planks: $2.98 (Home Depot)

One box of wood screws: $10 (Home Depot)

Blue and white spray paint: 2*$6.50 = $13 (Home Depot)

~6 hours of work: 6*$20 = $120

TOTAL: $152.72