DIY Toy Box with No Plywood
- info3063374
- Sep 30, 2024
- 2 min read
When a friend calls, you answer. Particularly if they're calling about building a toy box to contain the living room clutter of three young girls. I'd never built a toy box like this, so I saw it as an opportunity to try out something new, and work with some materials that I'd never tried before.
I learned a lot in this project, which you can see in the video I posted to the NineRings WoodCraft YouTube Channel. And if you're looking for plans to build one of your own, you can find my plans for this toy box on my Etsy Store.
This is the first box of this size that I've made, which presented its own unique set of challenges. First was that my friend wanted everything to be made of wood—no plywood, MDF, particle board, or anything like that. No problem. Panels are easy enough to glue up, particularly when you have access to the great jointer and planer available at a makerspace like Lowell Makes. Plywood would have been easier and faster, but ease and speed aren't my primary objectives with projects I make for friends.
The second challenge of this woodworking project was to make sure that it's safe for her three little girls. Crunched fingers and clonked heads are not my dream for this project. So I made sure to leave plenty of space between the lid and the walls for little fingers to rest safely, and installed a pair of soft close pistons on the lid to make sure that it only closes when it's supposed to. Honestly, I'll probably use a different solution the next time that I build one of this—I'm thinking hinges with the soft close feature build into them.
Finally, there was the challenge of size. This is one of the bigger projects that I made in my small basement workshop, and that space limitation definitely reared its head here. I could only work on so many components at ones, and it was hard to move the finished unit around while I was finishing different segments with OSMO. And then of course I had to carry it upstairs. Though all that manhandling did help me discover a design flaw; I'd forgotten to add handles. Fortunately, this isn't going to be as much of a problem going forward, as I recently built an addition on my house.
All in all, this was a great project for me to take on. I worked with some new hardware, tried out a new finish, and really pushed the limit of what I could build in my existing space. I also discovered that this is a size project that I really enjoy. I don't know that I'm ever going to be a dining table manufacturer, though of course I already have plans to build a couple, but toy boxes, night stands, and coffee tables all sound very doable to me.
Some of the tools I used in this project.
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