100% Wife-approved woodworking: build a scrapbook paper organizer

Hey, I'm Stephen, and today my wife asked me to figure out how to store her scrapbooking paper.

In all seriousness, it's very hard to find affordable storage shelves for this 12 by 12 craft paper, but I've put together a design. So off to the shop we go. My wife doesn't usually give me specific woodworking projects, but her research online led her to believe I could make her something better that would fit the space she has for her scrapbooking paper to a t. We also wanted to keep the price down, so we went with the king and queen of noxious sawdust production, MDF and hardboard. As you've seen, my first stop was the table saw where I began breaking down my sheet goods into their various sizes. I'm not sure why, but I actually love this part of the process. Go figure. And right here, I should address what some of you are thinking. Yes, I am running the narrow edge of this hardboard against the table saw. And no, I don't think I'm going to lose my fingers because of this. I'd never do this with anything narrow, but this panel has more than enough surface area against the fence to ensure nothing janky happens. But hey, would you make this cut? Let me know what you think in the comments.

So for this next part here, according to my plans, I've got some dados or grooves that I've gotta put into the side pieces where the shelves are going to nest. While I could use something like this flat top ripping blade for this, I want these to be stop grooves. I just don't want to see the edges of the shelves. I want everything to be contained and to look really good. So I'm actually going to be going over to the router table and installing an eighth inch straight bit into the router table where I'm gonna make these cuts. I'll show you how to do that. For those of you who maybe only have a table saw or even only have a sliding miter saw with a a grooving option, what I would say to that is you can totally do that, just allowing the grooves to go all the way through and just dealing with the way that it looks. or you could do that and then you could actually add on some material into the front after the fact, before you paint everything. And that as well would hide those grooves. So let me show you what I'm gonna do over at the router table. I want to set the height of this bit and I want it to be about halfway up the side. To help me know exactly where to stop and start I am marking the outside and inside edges of my router bit on my fence.

So now what we have to do here, we're going to drop into this cut half an inch in, and then we're going to finish the cut in the groove here.

And I need to cut some rabbets. No, not that kind. I'm using my dado stack and a sacrificial fence for this. But you can totally do the same thing at the router table or with a horizontal and vertical cut at the table saw. So it's okay. You don't need a dado stack. These videos take a lot of time and effort. If you're enjoying them, it would mean the world if you'd give this video a like, or even better, leave a comment. And if you really like what you see, would you consider clicking the subscribe button? Thanks. Okay, I got my sacrificial fence here, which I'm going to use these clamps to go ahead and hook to the fence. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get my fit close and then we're going to move it just ever so slightly over and over again fitting everything as we go until we come up with the perfect fit. Measure in one inch on each side. And I'm gonna just take a little thin piece of scrap here and I'm going to try and see what kind of curve I would like. All right, I've cut out my template and sanded it the way that I want it. I'm gonna stack everything nicely. Tape this bundle together.

Could also use double-sided sticky tape for this so that there's no variation. I'm going to cut close to my line through the whole stack. And then I'm gonna take this over to the router table and I'll use a flush trim bit to clean it up. All right, we're gonna do a dry fit here. And here's the back piece. Slide in there. Has to be on this side cuz I missed it up a little bit. And I need that to be on the bottom. All right, even that up. Now here's the interesting part is I have a whole lot of these side pieces that have to go in... and I forgot one. Cool, so cool. I'll be right back. I need to do that same process with this again. And I've gotta set each of these in here, facing the front. And we've got the side. And this is the hard part here cuz there's a lot of individual pieces that are just floating around here that all need to lock in at the same time. All right time to do it for real, I guess? Really there's no movement happening here side to side, even without the back and the top. So I think just that little bit of glue will actually be fine and we're gonna leave it like this, that's gonna make things way easier.

Don't feel like you have to get any kind of fancy spreader or anything to spread your glue. Your finger would work too, but for me, I have the spreader, so I figure why not use the spreader? I am using a fancier kind of clamp. These Bessey's, but any clamp will do: some pipe clamps or f clamps. Just go like that. Grab some of this glue we're getting squeeze out, so that's good. Not quite getting the squeeze out that I want in this one spot. Just gonna check that everything is square. So at this point here, we will just let this glue set up and I'll probably come back tomorrow after we finish up with our church services and we'll get this thing finished off for the wife.

All right, so here it is, the craft paper holder. And I'm, I'm really thinking that my wife is gonna enjoy this. She didn't want anything fancy done to it. she's putting it on a shelf, so she just wanted it primed. And that was it. a couple things I would do a little bit differently: because I didn't glue in these shelves here, what I would do is I would actually paint them ahead of time and then glue everything together. It was a little bit of a, a nightmare getting all of the spray in there. Hey, if you liked this video and the project that I was doing, there's a lot more coming down the pipe. So be sure to subscribe over here. And then once you've done that, go ahead and check out one of these videos.