Thursday, December 5, 2013

The long awaited closets

Yes, so it has been quite a while since my last update. To be honest, I have had the closet organizers (yes, both of them) finished for quite some time now, so here I will be going over the final steps I took in their construction.

I left off last time with an applied finish. I mentioned that I used fine steel wool for the final finish. I found in later cases that I got a similar, yet nicer finish (i.e. without the streaks) by simply progressing through 320, 400 and 600 grit with my random orbit sander, so this is the method I used for the majority of the surfaces in the end.

Following the finishing steps, I needed to make some grooves in the upright pieces to accept the shelf standards I intended to install. In order to do this, I used a new toy (well, new at the time), a router table (shown below).

The router itself is a Mastercraft (Canada's Canadian Tire brand) 1.75 HP fixed base router. I got the router and table along with a ~36 piece router bit set off of an add on Craigslist. It was hardly used and overall cost maybe about a third retail. It's not the best table, but it works, and the router runs well enough. From my experiences so far, the high speed steel router bits it came with suck, so I've been replacing some of the bits with better, carbide bits as they wear out (which doesn't take long). Using this router, I made the required grooves which are shown here.

Of course I bought oversized shelf standards, so I needed to cut them to length with another new toy my wife got my for my birthday (quite a while ago now though), a fun Dremel rotary tool. This is the type of tool that always brings a smile to my face when I pick it up. It has many uses for these types of small jobs.


And finally the standards were installed. Unfortunately I did not end up taking any photos of the assembly of the organizer units (nor any really of the construction of the second unit), but I will say that it went together quite smoothly using simple screws to hold the pieces together. Below you can see the finished product of this closet organizer. The cart underneath the large shelf is a laundry organizer. The second unit is very similar except instead of the large middle shelf, there is simply a taller set of shelves to the side, and two layers of hanging rods.



I hope you enjoyed this build, it is the reason I got into woodworking to begin with, so to have the finished product is really a source of pride with me since it was also the project which conveyed the message "See? I CAN make nice things!" (there was indeed some skepticism when I began these projects, but the support was always there nonetheless).

On a more up to date note, I have been working hard on several projects, but unfortunately I won't be able to reveal any of them until after December 25th! Until then, I hope to have another post or two with perhaps some other miscellaneous updates.