Mistakes and misunderstandings

I’ve been dabbling, working on it here and there in the free time I have. I don’t want any of you to think this basic unit has actually taken me this long to make!

First, the mistake

A small part of the design included a 24″ wide bench beside the entryway door to allow someone to sit down to remove or put on their shoes. An area below the bench was added to store miscellaneous items. Simple, right?

Rushing through jobs almost always forces mistakes to happen. I designed the unit on a single piece of paper, with some overall measurements jotted down to guide me. There are many industry standards that affect furniture. Everything from countertop and table top heights to some bed and chair dimensions. The bench height was the only industry standard I needed to consider, as everything else was just cubbies for storage. I jotted down 29″ high for my little bench cabinet, as that’s what I recalled was the standard for any surface you sit on, and got to work.

I made the cabinet, including a 4″ high base, brought it home, put it in place, screwed it to the wall and sat down. Or at least I tried to. It was very high. I’m not a tall guy, and my wife is quite short. If I was having trouble sitting on this bench, it would be impossible for her to sit on it. I scratched my head and wondered what went wrong. It was at this point I realized I used the wrong measurement standard. Instead of using the chair standard, which is between 17″ and 19″, I used the dining table height standard of between 28″ and 30″. It was just one of those things where rushing made me forget to check if that height was even close to correct.

I told my wife I could make her a booster step so she could use the bench. She wasn’t amused. “I’ll cut it down to the proper size,” I quickly reassured her.

Back to the shop, where I used the table saw to trim the back and two gables down to the proper height. I also got rid of the base entirely, as that was an extra 4″ of height we could use for storage. I attached the bench seat on top of this freshly made cabinet, brought it home again and screwed it in place. Perfect fit.

This mishap certainly wasn’t the end of the world, but I find it frustrating to have to redo any work I’ve done. Having said that, spending another 20 minutes to fix this mistake wasn’t too bad at all.

The misunderstanding

Designing this unit was fairly straightforward. The large wall has mainly cubbies, along with an area near the middle to hang coats. The mating wall has the 24″ wide bench as well as a 24″ wide upper storage cabinet. The tricky part of all of this is deciding how to have the cabinets on the two walls meet. Trying to explain this to my wife was also another challenge. I am a bit better at imagining in three dimensions, but I did my best to describe to her how things would look and function. I said we might want to reduce the depth of the 24″ wide upper cabinet from 16″ (like all the other cabinets) to 12″. It would interfere less with the upper cabinets on the mating wall and might even look a bit better. Wanting as much storage as possible, she wanted to leave it at 16″. Okay, 16″ deep it is.

I made the cabinet, along with all the others, and installed them, before calling my wife in to see the progress. Although she liked most of what she saw, she thought the upper 16″ deep cabinet seemed to block the cabinets on the mating wall too much, not to mention it just looked too deep and awkward. I tried to bite my tongue, but eventually mentioned that not only I agreed with her, but I had tried to talk her into that approach in the first place. Not to worry, as I could just trim it down to size on the table saw, along with the bench cabinet.

It’s now installed and functions nicely. It also doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

A nice surprise

When I cut 4″ off of the front of the upper cabinet, I looked at the offcut with intrigue. It was essentially a 4″ deep frame, the exact same width and height of the cabinet. I thought it might make a good frame for some sort of key and wallet valet, or possibly for some miscellaneous bike tools that get used frequently. I hate waste, and reusing this frame might be both handy and allow me to not waste the material.

Now that the storage unit is all done, we will have to start deciding what coats, bike helmets, mitts, gloves, boots and shoes to give away, as I’m having trouble finding a spot for everything we wanted to store here. I fear getting the short end of the stick in this situation. After all, it was me who made the storage unit too small, right?!