Sewing Cubby and Speaker Stands
One of the challenges of woodworking in an apartment is finding a place to store pieces of leftover plywood. After I built the IKEA knock-off bookshelf last summer, I stashed the leftovers behind our bed. Kelly and I agreed that these pieces would eventually turn into a cubby system for my studio. As it turned out, the pieces weren't quite large enough for the desktop hutch I designed, so I created even more scrap lumber. I stacked some of the pieces underneath the couch in the living room, but we were running out of room. The only thing left to do to reduce the stockpile aside from freecycling it or throwing it away was to build again.
Sewing Cubby
One leftover piece of plywood was used to make Kelly's sewing organizer. She also wanted a cubby system to store some of her batting and yarn.
We started off with some sketches -- first exploring possible features of the unit
and then deciding how big we could make it given the available materials.
I fleshed out the design in Google Sketchup so Kelly could get a sense of the proportions and then built it. All joints are butt joints attached with 2" coarse-thread wood screws.
Speaker Stands
Since days after we moved into our current apartment, our speakers have been perched atop cubes of taped-together CD jewel cases. This helped to eliminate some of the unpleasant boominess, but I've never been satisfied with the sound in the room. Months ago, I tried some experiments and found I liked the sound better when the speakers were elevated to ear height while I was seated on the couch. I didn't think it would be too difficult to make speaker stands; I just didn't get around to doing it until now.
Height and stability were the most important considerations in my design, so I tried to work with those parameters before considering whether I had enough leftover plywood to actually build the design.
After completing the design, I took stock of my remaining plywood and found I was very short of the material my design required. I considered making the stands shorter, but wasn't really satisfied with the idea, so I let the design sit for a few days and then realized that by making the uprights thinner, I could still keep the height I wanted.
I revised the design and then began building.
I uploaded the model to the Sketchup 3D Warehouse, so you can download it if you like.