Caddy Project

Our four-year-old loves to draw. This is awesome but unfortunately lot of times this means he is savaging the printer looking for paper because he has run out of stock in his room.   Since his supply was in a cardboard box under his desk, out-of-sight-out-of-mind, he would have nothing left before we even knew he was getting low.

Well, that's an easy one - make him a paper caddy he could put on his desk. Actually, since the one his mom had was replaced by the new one I made her, it was just a matter of staining it the color and style of his desk.  

I applied the gel stain with a coarse brush to match the appearance of the surface of the desk and called it done. Elapsed time, twenty minutes. It took a couple of days to dry completely because of the low temps and high humidity in the garage and the thick coat required to match the desktop, but otherwise there were no problems. 

That's the way I like 'em : projects that just need me to put down the TV remote and beer for once, go out into the garage, slap a quick, almost care-free coat of paint on something and celebrate with a beer before staggering back into the house to finish that half a beer some dude left near the TV remote.    

Fine. Paper is taken care of. What about pens and markers and crayons and stuff, you ask?  "What about them?" I reply. He's got a cache of these things in pretty much every room of this place.  Heck, I wouldn't be surprised to discover a nearly new box of Crayolas in the crawl space under the house someday for crissakes!   Boy, when I was coming up I had half a Baggie of paperless crayon nubs, three-quarters of which were burnt sienna and the other 37% were so covered in burnt sienna chunks and smudges you couldn't tell what the hell they were!  Did I complain?  No!  Sure, the only things I could draw accurately were deserts, certain dogs, and the Baggie of nubs itself, but I was happy... And that's the story of how I invented sepia-toning. 

(Puts down beer. Gets cup of Earl Grey instead.)

Like the stone garden project I did a few years back, the real driver for building a lazy-Susan style desk caddy was the wife pointing to a photograph she saw and asking "Do you think you could build something like this?"

"Why, yes!  Yes I can!" is my usual response to these types of questions, based somewhat on using her misguided hope to leverage myself a new tool of some kind, but based primarily on the fact that every husband’s and dad’s job is pretty much “making it up as you go along”.

In this instance, though, I had all the tools I needed (darn), I had the wood and paint on hand, and I even had a lazy Susan mechanism sitting in the garage.

I was going to use this last item as part of a rotating benchtop vertical storage unit for my function generator, soldering station, and other electronics stuff but that effort kept getting pushed to the back burner for one reason or another. Since those mechanisms are surprisingly cheap (six bucks) I figure I could always pick up another one later if I choose to push forward with it. 

I made a jig (that's a churched-up way of saying a hammered a nail through a board into another board) and cut an 8 1/2" circle on the bandsaw for the top part of the base. The bottom part of the base is just a 6 1/2" square with rounded edges.

Since she wanted six storage compartments I cut the compartment dividers on the table saw with 30 degree bevels where those dividers came together. This lets three of the pieces meet in the exact center of the circular base spaced 120 degrees apart. The other three were cut to the same angle, but were made slightly shorter to take into account that I was not using wood of zero thickness.  Although if I did, I suppose that would save on wear and tear of the saw blades... Maybe I just need to work on my cutting technique...

The walls were sloped down from the center to two inches high and a slight curve was placed on each. The slope was so you could see shorter items like crayons from the front and the curve was just cuz I thought it would look cool. A 30 degree cut was dadoed into each side of all the walls so a short thin piece of scrap cedar paneling could be slotted into place for the front walls. 

After adding a couple of wooden disks and a wooden "button"  to the top it was pretty much done.  I painted it red.  

There are the finished products in the pic on the left.   Based on how much real estate they take up on his desk, though, I can picture the next question from the wife now: “Do you think you could build him a bigger desk?”

“Why, yes!  Yes I can.  Oh, but, you know, honey, the job would be ever so much easier if I just had an arc welder...”

Shhhhh... ;)