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It’s not quite winter but I’m starting to settle into winter projects already.  Over the next few weeks I’ll continue to work on the garden infrastructure outside by putting up the new fencing, building raised beds and prepping for water and electricity expansions in the spring (this includes getting the solar field ready!), but once the real cold hits we’ll primarily work on interior details.  Now that the house has aged in place for a full year with drywall and things weighing it down, it should have worked out the majority of the settling.  So now it’s time to calk and patch and generally tighten up the bits that didn’t get addressed last year.

The first project was creating a built in cabinet to utilize dead space created by the shower enclosure. We designed this shelving and cabinet insert to take advantage of every nook and cranny created by our shower partition and the bench seat inside the shower.

Previously we just had an ugly patch over this hole… now the bottom drawer extends nearly two feet into the base of the shower and allows us to store towels etc right under the shower’s bench seat.  I used the cheapest materials possible for this unit and applied a few tricks to keep a consistent modern look in this space.

For the face frame of the cabinet I was able to utilize really rough plywood I already had on hand by using leftover drywall compound to fill in all the imperfections before painting.  The inside of the shelf space is the same color paint as the walls in this room and the face frame is the same chalkboard paint as the door.  The drawer guides we had laying around in the shop from who knows where.  The only materials we had to purchase were a sheet of cabinet grade plywood for the box itself and a drawer pull.  Total cost was under $30!

It’s a tight space so it was hard to get a good angle for taking a pic.  Here it is with the bottom drawer open and closed…

    

We’ll follow this up with a post on all the different ways we packed in storage and made plenty of space within our 1,000 square foot living area sometime soon.

Next up, i’m going to squeeze in a dining room table similar to the two nightstands I’ve made recently.  The first nightstand we posted about here. The other we haven’t had a chance to take decent pics of, but here’s some rough shots of it I took with my iPhone. The dining room table will use up the majority of the remaining bamboo and cedar scraps, and I’m hoping to build the legs from the leftover 2″ square tube steel we created the handrail out of.

   

From there it’s on to detailing out the house and building the interior doors.  We’ve only got 2 interior doors in the whole house so far.  Some of the new doors will be hung on barn-like track hardware and we’ll make the rest similar to the chalkboard door for the bathroom.  If there’s time before spring hits and garden work takes priority, we’d also like to erect a twelve foot tall book shelf complete with rolling ladder as a centerpiece to the main space upstairs.

All these new skills I’m learning should really come in handy as we begin work on the cabins next year!

Talk to you soon!