Since Sarah and I do not have any prior experience with manipulating wood, we decided to follow the Beginner’s guide.
Gathering material
Sarah and I started by cutting pieces of wood following the dimensions provided in the Beginner’s guide (9 x 14.5” of 1×4 , 6 x 12” of 1×4 and 4 x 10-11” of 2×2). We measured one piece of each dimension and used the OEDK’s mitre saw to cut them. We then placed the cut piece over the uncut one and traced a line indicating where it should be cut.
The mitre saw on this image is used as an example, it is not the one we actually used
Initially, we wanted to complete all measurements first and then us the mitre saw but decided to do otherwise to avoid having shorter pieces of wood since the saw cuts around 0.08″ of wood.
Sanding
For me, this was the most tedious part of creating The Box. We sanded each of the pieces of wood with a sander. We started by using a rougher sand paper to eliminate any sharp spots and ended with a smoother one.
This shows the sander with the two different sand papers used
First screws
I never really manipulated drills or wood before so this was very new. Sarah and I began by screwing four sides of the box together.
We first clamped two pieces of wood together using the corner clamping method.
We also used two clamps to clamp the corner clamp to the edge of a table
We placed two pieces of wood in the corner clamp and drew two dots at equal distances from the edge of the wood. These dots served as reference for us to know where to drill the screws into the wood.
After a lot of focus and effort, we secured our four pieces together! We tried to fit our three bottom pieces of wood in and…
Oh no
We did not line up the ends correctly. Instead of placing the longer pieces inside, we placed them outside and it altered the whole shape of our box 🙁
This meant we had to re-start and cut new pieces of wood. Fortunately, Sarah and I were going a lot faster than when we first started since we familiarised ourselves with the tools. Also to go faster, we decided that I would be making two pilot holes in the wood and Sarah would countersink the screws while I switched the drill to the Phillips head bit and screw in the screws.
Countersinking the screws
pieces of wood being scratched off when countersinking
Oh no
Another failure of ours happened when countersinking the screws. As can be seen in the picture above, pieces of wood would be scratched off. We tried sanding the sides to make this less visible.
After securing four pieces together three times, we used the router to round their sides and sanded the pieces of wood again.
We used the router for each side
We then attached the three bottom pieces of wood with a drill and added the pillars in each corner.
We used two clamps to make each pillar stay in place
We used pieces of foam to space the three frames along the pillars. This led us to our third failure, although this one is a bit smaller. When we clamped the frames to the table, the foam got compressed between them and it was really hard to get it out. We had to use scissors to get it out and were scared for a few minutes that the foam could not be removed.
piece of foam between two frames
fortunately, we managed to get the first piece of foam out and decided to use a smaller piece for it to be easier to remove once the frame is screwed into the pillars
After this, we were almost done with out box!
All we had to do was sand it one last time and apply a layer of stain.
Cost Analysis
14.5 x 9 + 12 * 6 = 202.5″ of 1 x 4 lumber wood: 26 x 2.98 = $75.43 (Home Depot)
4 x 11 = 44″ 2 x 2 lumber wood: 5.5 x 2.98 = $16.39 (Home Depot)
1.5″ wood screws: $13.45 for 100 screws (Amazon)
Labor cost: 17.86 x 10 = $178.6 (Indeed, average salary of a woodworker)
Stain + brush: 13.48 + 1.57 = $15.05 (Home Depot)
Total = $298.92
