Shelved 2

My friends commissioned me to build storage under the open staircase in their apartment. I wanted to keep the open feeling of the staircase, so not completely build it up. And I also wanted to respect their quirky, eclectic decor and taste for natural materials. I chose a system of boxes + planks. This also made the construction process easier, as I was able to assemble the boxes separately at my apartment.

For a combination of workability+price, I decided to use 3-ply spruce to construct the boxes. As the name implies, there are 3 layers of wood glued perpendicular to each other. To make clean joints, I really wanted to make the three layers wrap around the corners. So I devised a system of routering that stepped the corners according to the thickness of the plys.

Of course, this kind of joinery would not have been feasible without a router. This was the first project where I used my new handheld router. I really liked the clean edges it gave. It was useful for everything from making strong drawer fronts to bevelling the door edges, to joining the panels of the boxes, to rounding the edges of the oak planks.

It took me a while to decide how to make the handles. I did some (failed) tests before finally deciding to just rout out a little bit of the edge of the door panel:

Overall, I think it is a success. I had a bit of trouble with the alignments because I really wanted the planks to align with certain steps of the stairs, but the steps were much thicker than the planks I used. But I was able to adjust the heights of the boxes to make it work.