Not A Rubix Cube

  This project was first started by Vanessa, one of my daughter-in-laws.   She asked for some assistance and I (being the guy that I am)  simply grabbed the wood out of her hands and hauled it home to my shop and worked on it there.   The orginal board was a 4' x 8' sheet of 1/2 inch plywood and the project was to build a 9-cube organizer.   I had never see or heard of such a critter, but later on, Pam showed me one that was in a magazine - Real Time Solutions.    They are available at Bed Bath & Beyond and they can be pretty sofisticated.   (Not this one.  It was a challenge for me the way it was.)   The precut plywood sheet came from Lowe's and had one strip cut across the width 12 inches wide and the balance had been cut into 4 strips that were 1 foot wide.  That is - they were suppose to be 1 foot wide, but as I had found out from an earlier project, each time you make a cut you loose an eighth of an inch from the saw kerf.    So the fourth strip turned out to be about 3/8's of an inch short of 12 inches. 

  I started out by cutting all the pieces required to make a 3' by 3' by 1' cube.   I did something a little different this time.   I varnished all the pieces that had been cut.   I had never done this before, but I was thinking that it would be easier to put a couple coats of finish on first and then assemble the pieces.   Once assembled, I would put on one final coat.     Pine plywood is not the most fun thing to work with as it requires a quite a bit of sanding (my favorite thing) and one has to fill in little gaps left in the middle of the layers of plywood.    There was no plan to stain this wood.   We just went with a basic pattern of making a cube.

     I got my trusty partner to help hold pieces while I nailed and glued sections together.   This was the first training for the "cat" and she appears not too happy about helping me out.    It took awhile for her to be able to hold a pencil behind her ear.   I guess this is a feat that is a little easier for humans to do.   Anyway, she is cheap labor.    (If only she could bark, she would be a real partner.)     

  This is how everything ended up.    Vanessa sent one of the felt boxes along with me to insert into one of the cubes.   (I would guess it was a test to see if it would fit.)   There are 9 of those felt boxes so there will be one for each hole.  Each box is a 1 foot cube and I think there are different colors.    I think the plan  for usage is that this project will fit into one of the kids' bedroom and will be used to store toys, or clothes, or whatever.     It was a fun little project and the challenge was the jointery of all the corners.   This is something that Vanessa probably would have enjoyed doing herself, but once again, I took over.   (I better be careful.   It is moves like that, that can cause the daughter-in-laws to look into the nursing home options.)