The Woodshop Shed

Storage Cubbies and Coat Rack for Mud Room

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


My wife got tired of storing our outdoor shoes in plastic milk crates and wanted storage cubbies and a new set of coat racks for our mud room.
I designed the cubby units-one large under the coat rack, and one small for the back door area of the mud room entrance.Used 3/4 birch ply from home depot for the carcasses and shelves, and Tamarack (Western Larch) for the shelf edging, cubby tops, and coat rack. The Tamarack is locally sourced in North Idaho and available at the local beam and millwork lumber yard. The shelf and top/bottom edging is 3/8 inch thick, and the tops and coat rack and shelf are 3/4 Tamarack glued up panels.Joinery is biscuits and screws, no glue. I opted to use this joinery for the carcasses as it worked well in previous projects. Joints are strong without glue, and using this method eliminated what would have been a huge “clamp, glue up, and fidget with” process with the number of shelves, top and bottom of the larger unit. I countersunk the screw holes, and used a plug cutter on the drill press to create plugs for the holes out of maple. Once the plugs were glued in, I used my Japanese flush trim saw to cut off the ends and sanded them smooth. The maple matched the birch very closely, and the plugs all but disappeared.All shelves and interior pieces were pre-finished before joinery with Minwax Polycrylic-3 coats brushed on.
The coat rack and shelf unit was joined with biscuits and glue, and the joint strengthened with 2” finish nails driven into the back from the top part of the shelf.The Tamarack will redden and darken over time-much like cherry-and give a nice contrast to the birch.Only change I would make if doing this type of casework again is to spend more $'s on a better quality of cabinet ply. The Home Depot birch ply has a “rice paper thin” veneer, which is easily damaged in milling. I had to glue little chips to fix the dings along edges where they occurred-a pain in the neck!

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