Hello everyone. With all my work at the docks I do not have a lot of free time, but one thing that has been bothering me is the lack of shelving and space to put all of my things.

I have a lot of planks and wood in the garage and no space to move... so using some of the wood for something useful is worth my time.

I only had a single day to do this build so I needed to move fast, measure and plan well, but also not sweat the small stuff. Which is GOOD since it means that I could not fuss over things and then procrastinate because of those things.

I took a lot of pictures because, of course I was going to make a Hive post about it. So let's begin at the beginning and I will run through the Process:

The Raw Materials

Like I mentioned... I have zero space in the garage... but I DO have some raw materials to make stuff with. As these pictures might show you... I am a bit of a hoarder.

Am I a board hoarder? Hahaha!

So as I have had bits of time I removed the nails and staples from the boards and got them ready for woodwork projects.

I still have a lot of these boards to prepare... so plenty upcoming projects when I eventually have time.

I have a few other kinds of boards and beams as well.

So I took the boards outside since there is zero space in the garage to do any work.

For this build you will simply need wooden planks and various sizes of screws.

Prepare Work Area.

Tools I used:

Cordless Sabre Saw - wood cutting blade
Cordless Drill - star head
Tape Measure
Pencil

Here is my box.

I set up two trestle legs outside and put a pallet on top of that. On top of this I put my cutting jig. This is something that I built that helps me to cut boards using the sabre-saw with fair ease.

So I can slot a board in up straight or flat, rest the sabre on the wood and line up my cut and then trigger and chop down. The jig helps me to keep the wood from moving while I cut it.

See the pencil mark? I cut right next to it with this tool combo. That is plenty accurate for the kind of build I needed to do.

Prep boards Phase

A big part of the job is to cut sets of boards into different lengths based on the quantities and lengths you need to build the actual project.

Soon enough I had plenty planks to make boards from.

Build a Board

So I figured out that I can build basic furniture by taking the planks and turning them into boards.

All I need to do is put the appropriate number of planks of the same length side by side and then put cross-brace planks on and use screws to attach them together.

The first board I made, I let the cross braces stick out and then cut them off... its easier to do it the other way around. Cut, then join. Haha.

Now all that needs to happen is a bit of repetition. I needed two long boards and two shorter boards to build my shelf.

Here is the short board. This will be the height of the shelf.

There we go. i have the four main boards done that I need to make the shelf box.

Assembly

Now I need to put them together.

Before I used 25mm screws to join the boards together but now I must attach the board together, this I use 50-70mm screws for. I had an assortment so I just used the most common one in the different parts.

First two boards together...

... then the other upright to make an H.

You will notice that I am using the existing cross-brace for my shelf to rest on. This means I do not need to install triangles to brace the shelf and make it sturdy.

I Then added the other shelf and I have a box shape.

It was intentional that the top sticks over a bit. I will be boxing that up to create a lip right around.

At the bottom some boards are added to stop things rolling in underneath the bottom shelf.

I then added short planks as backing boards.

Just like the boxed up boards at the front at the bottom, this is to stop things from falling out of the shelves. Everything stays inside my shelf.

Finished Project!

And here is the completed box! A top shelf with a lip right around and a box at the bottom with a slight lip and a decent space to keep all my stuff!

Very soon Lexi found the box and decided that it was something that she can occupy!

Lexi says: "This is like a little house for me right?"

Hmmm... maybe I WILL build some sort of Cat House... Interesting idea. Although the cat loves taking over this shelf, what are the chances they ignore the specially made thing completely?