Advent Calendar

I made this a few years ago and I thought with Christmas on the way that now would be a good time to post it.  I made two of these and my daughters did the decorating of the "attics".  

It is designed around using Home Depot 1/4x2-3/4 poplar for the drawers and 3/8x2-1/4 pine project pieces for the cabinet so that I would not have to dimension thicker stock.   The drawer fronts are poplar and the sides and bottoms are HD cheap birch plywood.  The cabinet is made in the traditional way cutting dados, miters and half laps on the table saw.   Since I wanted to cut the drawers' front profiles and engrave the numbers on the CNC anyway, I decided to see if I could cut all of the drawer pieces on the CNC as well.   I made two of these and I did not relish cutting the tiny sides and bottoms for 50 drawers on the table saw.   I probably would have had to make a sled to do this safely on such small pieces and I really didn't want to do that.  

The miter joints were cut with a 90° V-bit and the top profile was done with a 1/4" end mill.   I do not have a picture of the sides being cutout but they are done basically the same way as the front but with a straight edge along the top.  

After making the first one, I decided that I wanted to add nobs.  The indent was probably fine for small fingers but the mobs are definitely easier for my fat fingers.  As you can see in the 5th picture, I turned little rounded ends on dowels to dress them up a little.  I had to manually drill the holes in the first set of drawers but I added a tool path to drill them with the end mill for the second set.    Note that the ones here that do not have holes are draw sides or backs.  They will have a straight top instead of the curved one. 

The drawer bottom were cut from plywood.  I used masking tape and super glue to secure the plywood to the spoilboard to insure that they didn't move as they were cut free as I didn't want any tabs to clean up on the miter joints. 

Clamping for the drawer assembly was done with rubber bands.  A few of them came out a little wonky and required a little work on my belt sander to clean them up and make them fit in the cabinet.  Keeping the miter joints from sliding around while putting rubber bands around them was a pain and as you can see here, I was not very successful.

I decided that simply attaching a couple of boards for the roof was a little boring so I used the CNC to engrave a shingle pattern you can see in the 4th picture.   The roof was painted white first so that the poplar's color would show through and provide the contrasting outline of the shingles.

I probably should have spent a little more time applying a finish but my wife just wanted a basic white paint and there wasn't much time before Christmas to get them done.  My wife supplied the trinkets used to decorate the attics.  She collects vintage Christmas decorations  pretty much year round so there was no shortage of things to choose from.