Woodworking Project: the Phone Shelf

So "designing" the bi-fold doors in SketchUp was really just replicating something in the program that already existed in real life. For my next self-imposed SketchUp tutorial, I wanted to try actually designing something in the software first, and then use those plans to build the physical object.

Well, for some time, the War Department had been wanting a little shelf in the front hall on which we could store our phones. Ever since we ditched the land line and went full mobile, our hall table (never all that tidy at the best of times) had become overrun with phones and charging cords. Not only that, but every time we unplugged one of the phones, the charging cord would invariably slip off the edge of the table and have to be retrieved from the floor or slot beside the table via various contortions.

The idea was to design a simple shelf that we could hang on the wall and to which the charge cords could be attached (or removed) so they wouldn't keep falling off onto the floor. This would also let us use the tabletop for other, more important things like receipts, wallets, half-packs of gum, keys, an old crystal ashtray slightly overflowing with coins, mail that needed to go upstairs but never seemed to make it any farther, sunglasses, gloves, misplaced remotes, address books without any addresses, flashlights, dead batteries, live batteries, feathers found on walks through the neighbourhood, expired or used up gift cards, completed shopping lists, a pen and paper for messages leftover from when the land line lived there and we might have to actually take a message, some bent nails that I pulled out of my pockets when I came in from the shop and didn't want to take upstairs, memory sticks, DVDs borrowed from the neighbours that we kept forgetting to give back, tape measures, old sore throat lozenges, six or seven assorted rubber bands, and whatever else happened to qualify for the exalted position of life's hallway detritus.

I had some pretty good ideas (or so I thought) for the overall design for this thing, and dove into SketchUp to see if I could do it.

Let's just say that it was a real learning experience.

I very quickly realized that my original plan was... not really feasible. I hadn't really thought through the joints and seams and construction of the thing and one thing I can say about SketchUp is that it REALLY forces you to work through these little details.

But with a few false starts and a fair amount of rethinking, I finally wound up with this:

The charge cords are supposed to be fed through the bottom of the shelf so that they hang from the front edge where they can be easily grabbed and plugged into the phone - which in turn sits on the shelf face up, at a slight angle, where it can easily be checked whenever one happens to be going by. There's also a slot at the back where, theoretically, one could store a tablet while it was charging, though as neither of us actually HAS a tablet, it's just a little extra feature I wanted to try. Just in case.

With the design at least somewhat finalized, I used SketchUp to make an exploded diagram that indicated all of the required dimensions and clearly identified all of the separate pieces.

Armed with my fancy little exploded diagram, and a few nice pieces of scrap alder, I headed into the shop to start building.

Which is where I learned my second very important lesson about designing stuff: thinking of something (and even laying it out in SketchUp) is not the same as actually building it. I had designed some ... er, interesting joints - especially for the lid - that proved to be exceptionally tricky to replicate in real life. I was also working with measurements that were a lot finer and more delicate than I had anticipated while designing the model. 

But I persevered, and after a few missteps (including an incorrect measurement visible in the exploded diagram above) and a couple of false starts, I managed to successfully build the phone shelf:

The back of the shelf is supposed to be mounted to the wall, and the shelf then rests on the back piece. The idea was to make it removable so we could get to the inside and remove the charge cords if necessary (to take them on a trip, for example), but easy to mount back on the wall as necessary.

Here's the back and the bottom:

Sadly, the back didn't QUITE work as intended (something of a design flaw), so we decided to just stain it, put some feet on the bottom (to keep the cords from getting pinched underneath it), and leave it sitting on the hall table.

And I have to say, it actually kind of works:

It's not my favorite project ever, but it does the job and I learned a LOT about design, SketchUp, and how unwilling I am to let my fingers get too close to a router bit.

Oh, and I got to build two separate jigs for this project, and making jigs makes for a very happy Don.