An Easy-To-Make Heirloom Toy Box

Last year my daughter-in-law asked me to build her this toy chest she found on Ana White’s website.

After a few delays, I finally got around to making her my version of Ana’s chest. Here’s what mine looks like before painting or finishing:

 

Now, my title says it’s an “heirloom” toy chest — which means it can be passed down to the next generations. That promises durability. Ana’s plans are known for their simplicity. Those with no woodworking experience and very limited tools can use her plans to make things — and that has some appeal.

However, butt joints are the weakest of all joints. You can glue a butt joint together and nail it, and the next day after it has dried, you can break it apart with your bare hands. The overlapping joint I use here, I can glue it and cross nail it with 16 gauge brad nails and after it has dried I can put it on the floor and stand on it with all of my 200 plus pounds and it won’t as much as creak. You’ll have to break the board to break the joint.

If that sort of strength and durability appeals to you, then these small and fairly simple changes are well worth the effort. All you need is either a router table and a 3/4″ straight router bit, or a table saw with a dado stack and you can build this box. A brad nailer or finish nailer is nice too, but not necessary if you don’t mind hand nailing and using a nail set.

So here’s my first change:

 

In the base, I make a 3/4″ dado cut and a 3/8″ rabbet. In Ana’s plan, the bottom of the box was just butted up against the side panels and screwed or nailed to it. This is a very weak joint. If kid’s climb into the box, you risk the bottom eventually giving way as screws work loose. Secondly, Ana has the box attached to the base in the same way. Everything is just floating, suspended by screws or nails. I find this to be weak construction. If it will only hold a few teddy bears and kids will never climb in it, perhaps it doesn’t matter, but I’d rather go for durability.

By fitting the bottom into the dados in the base, it isn’t ever going anywhere and it doesn’t need to be screwed or nailed to stay put.

The rabbet allows an overlapping, cross-nailed joint, which is incredibly strong as already mentioned. This is demonstrated in the photo below.

 

If it isn’t self-explanatory, cross nailing is incredibly strong because the strength of a nail is its perpendicular holding power. If you nail something and then pull on the board parallel to the direction of the nail, you can easily pull the board off the nail. However, if you try to pull a board perpendicular to the nail’s direction — well, try it and let me know how that works. With cross-nailing, regardless of what direction you stress the joint it will always be stressing perpendicular to at least two nails. That, coupled with the strength of the increased glue surface in this joint makes it one of the strongest joints you can make short of a dovetail or mortise and tenon joint — and it’s very easy to make. If you are using 3/4″ stock, then make a 3/8″ by 3/8″ rabbet in each end, and glue it up and cross-nail it. This base is as solid as the rock of Gibraltar.

Next, I made 3/4″ dados in the top side of the box bottom. See photo below:

 

The joints don’t look flush and tight here because the haven’t been clamped, glued and nailed. They are just loosely dry fitted for demonstration. The side panels will fit into these dados, giving them added strength and stability, and eliminating any possible gaps in the joint seams.

Pre-drill into the center of the dados until you come out the bottom side. Do this all the way around the dados. The apply glue to the dados, install your side panels (they are also cross-nailed, overlapping joints). After the side panels are installed and nailed together, turn the box over and you can clearly see where the screws go. Counter sink these screw holes and then secure the side panels with 2″ self-tapping wood screws from the bottom. (I use Kreg screws, but you can use drywall screws if you want).

From this point on, you just add your top frame and molding an you’re done. I built the top frame to print (butt-joined them), but attached them with two pocket screws per joint from the bottom side. The molding hides the pocket screws, and it’s a stronger joint that nails through the end.

The moulding and decorative edges you use is a matter of personal preference.

If you make one of these, leave me a link to your photo or blog post in the comments. I’d love to see what you do with this.

An Easy-Peasy Crown Moulding Cheat

I need to install crown moulding in a large room. Now you could use a stud finder and find all the studs in the walls and mark them (but then you’d have marks on your walls). You’d also have to find all the ceiling joists and mark them as well. Of course, you’d inevitably have the problem of missing a stud or joist here and there and having to pull a nail, try again, and then putty two holes. That’s a lot of work.

I thought it would be so much easier to have a nailer behind the moulding. Unfortunately, to my amazement, they don’t make any such thing. Why, is beyond me, but I decided it couldn’t be that hard to make my own.

The bad news is figuring out how to cut the nailer is a little tricky (but that’s why I’m posting this article), but once you know the cut dimensions, the rest is a piece of cake.

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NOTE:  This article assumes 3-1/4″ wide moulding.  Your dimensions will need to be adjusted for wider moulding.

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I started by measuring the moulding an creating a model to those dimensions in Sketchup (see figure below):

Now, if you have crown moulding that is 45° angles on both ends, this is much easier. The 52°/38° design is a common moulding configuration, however. The problem with this is that most table saws won’t cut past 45°. No worries.

You really don’t want to try to get as “snug” a fit as is pictured above anyway. There needs to be a relaxed enough clearance that the moulding will still fit tightly against the wall and ceiling in spite of inconsistencies in your cut or bumps in your wall. I would aim for 1/16″ to 1/8″ inch clearance between the moulding and the nailer strip.

You’ll notice the Sketchup tool measures the back side of the nailer at about 1 1/16″ inch. Actually, I found this to be about the ideal measurement for a relaxed fit. I set my table saw at about 1 5/16″ and after two cuts was left with 1 1/6″ as pictured below.

Click image for larger view.

You’ll notice the fit is perfect even though the angles aren’t perfect.  As mentioned previously, my table saw can’t cut a 52° angle. I set the table saw at 38% and made the first cut.

You can use 3/4″ plywood if you like. I used cheap econo-grade 1×3 lumber. However many boards you need to cut, make all the 38° first cuts. Then set your table saw to 45° (which is as close to 52° as you can get), flip your boards over with the 38° angle against the fence and make your second cut.

Now that all your pieces are cut, you’ll notice in the Sketchup drawing that the nailer board needs to stay within 1-1/2″ of the wall on the ceiling side to leave room for the crown molding. Take a 2×4 block, lay the wide side again the wall, so the 1-1/2 edge is against the ceiling and mark the edge on the ceiling with a pencil. Do this every couple of feet. Place the 38° angle side of your nailer against the ceiling, putting the edge right on your pencil mark and screw to the wall plate.

It’s a good idea to pre-drill your nailer strip so it doesn’t split. I would also use 3-inch drywall screws instead of wood screws for the same reason. If you’re using 8-foot nailer lengths, one screw at either end and one in the middle should suffice. Just make sure you angle your pre-drilled hole so that the screw is hitting the center of the wall’s top plate, and you’ll be set.

Now, you can put your crown moulding up without any worries or tedium over what you’re going to nail to.

How Do You Choose Your Delivery Service?

OK, our garage is behind our house. Consequently, we don’t use our front door. When we get out of our car, we are 6 ft away from our back door. The front porch and sidewalk stays buried under 2 or 3 ft snow drifts all winter (your clue that we don’t use that access).

The postal lady puts packages inside our garage and leaves a note that she placed it there. The UPS driver either leaves the package inside the garage door or (if small enough) between the back door and the screen door.

I got a notification that FedEx delivered a package today. I go out to look for it, and find it on the front porch. This guy intentionally waded through 20 yards of knee-high half-frozen drifts of snow to get that package there.

So here’s the question: When you’re considering what delivery service to use, do you say —

A. I’m using the guy that’s willing to wade drifts, climb mountains, forge streams and scale walls if necessary to deliver the package.

or…

B. I’m NOT using the guy that’s not smart enough to leave the package at the door that already has shoveled access.

How to Embed a Third Party Video in a WordPress Hosted Blog

So you found this really cool video you want to share on your blog, but how do you embed it rather than just linking to it?  Well, if you found it on YouTube or one of the other following shortcode-supported sources, the process is simple and straightforward:

•  embeds a Blip.tv video. » Full instructions
• [cnnmoney-video] embeds a CNNMoney video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a DailyMotion video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a Flickr video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a Hulu video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a Kickstarter video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a TED Talks video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a Twitch.tv stream. » Full instructions
•  embeds a YouTube video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a Vimeo video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a Vine video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a VideoPress video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a YouTube video. » Full instructions
•  embeds a video from The Internet Archive. » Full instructions

But what if you find it on another non-supported site – for this example, the main CNN website.  It gives you an “embed” code by clicking the <> symbol at the top of the video, but it won’t work.  None of the shortcodes will work either.

I wish I could tell you there is a simple way.  I can’t tell you that, but I will tell you how it can be done if you don’t mind taking a few extra steps.

First of all, you’ll want to save the following snippet as a template you can refer to later (you’ll need to delete the asterisk after the first square bracket – it was necessary to include so it displays on this page as text rather than WordPress converting it to a shortcode statement):

[*gigya src="SOURCEFILE" flashvars="VARIABLES" width="416" height=
"374" quality="high" wmode="transparent" allowFullScreen="true"]

You can change the width and height to match that of the source video as well if you like depending on available space on your blog page, but the only thing we need to replace are the two variables in all caps:  SOURCEFILE and VARIABLES.  So where do we find these.

Go to your CNN video page (or whatever site your video is on) and instead of clicking on one of the share buttons, right click anywhere on the page except on the video (you will only get flash options if you click on the video).  Then in the options dialogue that pops up click “View Page Source.”  [Note: In Internet Explorer the menu item simply says “View Source”].  You’ll get a page full of code, which may or may not make any sense to you.  Don’t worry about that.  Your just going to scroll down the page a bit and look for a block of code that looks like this (delete asterisk here as well):

<*embed src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0
/swf/cnn_embed_2x_container.swf?site=cnn&profile=desktop&
context=embedwww&videoId=us/2013/11/15/dnt-gay-marine-
waitress-stiffed.wabc&contentId=us/2013/11/15/dnt-gay-marine-
waitress-stiffed.wabc" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
width="768" height="432" wmode="transparent" bgcolor="
\#000000" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always">
</embed>

Obviously, the text won’t be color highlighted.  I added the highlights to separate the two sets of variables we are looking for.  The text highlighted in red you will copy and paste in place of the SOURCEFILE text in your template.  The text highlighted in blue you will copy and paste in place of the VARIABLES text in your template.  You final piece of code should look like this (again delete the asterisk after the first square bracket):

[*gigya src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/
3.0/swf/cnn_embed_2x_container.swf" flashvars="site=cnn
&profile=desktop&context=embedwww&videoId=us/2013/11/15/dnt-
gay-marine-waitress-stiffed.wabc&contentId=us/2013/11/15/dnt-
gay-marine-waitress-stiffed.wabc" width="416" height="374" 
quality="high" wmode="transparent" allowFullScreen="true"]

Now you can copy that block of text and paste it into your WordPress Post or Page editor.  Make sure you paste in the “Text” tab, not the “Visual” tab.  Now click either the Publish or Preview button and the video should appear when the page is generated.

Here is an example of the above code in action:

Why To-Do Lists Don’t Work as Well for Men as Women

In a recent Lifehacker.com article, Marissa Meyer argues that simply having a to-list and prioritizing it is the important thing — not finishing it.

(Photo credit: SalFalko)

This approach may work well for women, but men will find it frustrating and stress inducing.  One of the key differences between men and women is the ability to multitask.  Few doubt that women are ahead of men in this category, and there are studies to back this up (also see “Related Articles” at the end of this post).

However, multitasking isn’t just restricted to actually physically performing multiple tasks at the same time, it also involves the process of mentally engaging with or thinking about multiple tasks.  While women are still better at this than men, one author on Inc.com suggests that this is stressful and reduces productivity for most people.

Married women who doubt this only need to ask their husbands to fix the leaking faucet, and then while he’s working on that ask him if when he’s done he would look at her closet door which doesn’t shut correctly, then a few minutes later as he’s still working on the faucet and hasn’t got to the closet door yet, ask him if he thinks he would be able to clean the gutters out today.

Married women who practice this approach to tasks probably have frequently irritable husbands and frequent tension in the relationship?  Why?  Men prefer to think about and complete one task at a time.  When that is done, that box is closed, then we can mentally move to the next task.  Having multiple problems thrown at us before we can finish one leaves us feeling overwhelmed and frustrated.  Even a single task — if it’s unplanned, unscheduled, and impromptu — is frustrating for men.

My suggestion for the Honey-Do list is for the wife to create her Honey-Do list and prioritize it — most important listed first, to least important last.    The man, however, should use this list to create a schedule.  Men work better with schedules than unstructured lists.  We can say at 8am Saturday I will cut the grass.  I will work in the garden from 9 to 10am.  After showering, we can do grocery shopping from 1030 to Noon.  We’ll have lunch and then at 1pm I’ll tackle the sink.  Men are very comfortable with this approach because their day/week is planned and in full control.  We don’t have things flying at us in a random, unplanned, uncontrolled fashion.

Women, if you don’t like that your husband scheduled one of your tasks for Saturday afternoon, ask if there’s any way he could schedule that one for an earlier date or time, but don’t try to force him to live outside his structured environment or always respond to tasks in an impromptu fashion — unless you just like living with an irritable man.

Related articles – [Go Back]

• Men and Women Think Differently: Female Brain is Better at Multitasking (scienceworldreport.com)
• Men and women’s brains wired differently (news.optuszoo.com.au)
• Finally, Scientific Proof That Explains Why Women Get More Done Than Men Do (thestir.cafemom.com)
• Women and Multitasking: Asset or Enemy? (forbes.com)