Build Log: Indoor Plywood Storage
The biggest downside of working with plywood is, well, working with plywood. Or rather, everything up to that point: getting it, handling it, breaking it down and storing it. By sheer luck, our garage has a nice straight-line transition into the house where we have a long wall which would make for a great spot to store plywood. Only if I can keep it pretty…
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Starting point
I quite like working with plywood: generally speaking, it’s strong, stable, relatively warp-resistant and there is a lot of consistency from sheet to sheet. Working with plywood means that I can immediately start working with putting panels together for a project rather than milling up lumber and gluing them into panels first. Obviously, there is a time and place for solid lumber, but plywood is great for a lot of projects that essentially boil down to, ‘make a [good enough] box’.
What’s not great about plywood? Everything up to that point: getting it home, maneuvering it around the shop, breaking it down and storing it - so pretty much everything else it seems! For me, working with plywood has gotten a bit easier over the years: a truck to bring it home, having a second pair of hands make maneuvering sheets around the shop much easier and a track-sas makes it a breeze to break down. Storing plywood (and offcuts!) has always been… annoying.
It’s just so big, bulky, awkward and heavy.
Over the years, I’ve gone through a few ways of storing plywood:
a pile on the floor - constantly tripping over it
leaned against a wall - never realized just how much plywood would just prefer to slide
a hastily built cart, leaned against the wall - this gets the plywood off the floor, but that’s about it
a better built cart, with offcut storage on nice, large wheels
The last plywood cart is very similar to many ‘plywood storage’ ideas you can find on YouTube: sheet storage on one side, offcut storage in dividers on the other; and I was able to store my tracksaw track-cases along the length of the cart. The large wheels made moving the fully loaded behemoth around a bit less painful.
This generic style of plywood cart is pretty common and for good reason: it’s pretty great for storing, organizing and just generally making plywood a lot more manageable in a shop. What it doesn’t help with though, is reducing the footprint needed.
My previous cart had a (top-down) footprint of 20”x98”; adding my tracksaw track case on the front bumps it out a bit, let’s call it 22”x98”. So far this is still fairly reasonable but doesn’t take into account that to access both sides of the cart requires room for the human to shimmy around. Granted, (at my last shop), 99% of the time, I left the cart pushed up against the wall until I explicitly needed to access the back side when I could intentionally wheel it out — but in my current space, I don’t have a “spare” patch of wall to push this up against, so I ended up parking it awkwardly in front of my shop-sink. It was a constant balance of not wanting the plywood cart in the middle of the shop but still having access (albeit tight) to the sink - needless to say, I was tripping over the cart constantly.
My garage does, however, very neatly open up into the den which has a nice, long, flat, wall…
Goals, objectives & conditions
Clearance to store the plywood in the den came with two conditions:
It couldn’t be an eyesore
This is a fairly high-traffic area, so it couldn’t jut out too much
I had some additional requirements
I wanted the storage to be entirely enclosed: bringing materials into the house will track sawdust, and I wanted to minimize that as much as possible
I had to preserve access to at least one of the outlets along that wall
I wanted to make this a ‘bolt-on’ project: if this needed to be removed down the road, it could be with minimal hassle
I wanted to be able to store at least five sheets of plywood — at my lumber supplier, 5-sheets is where the first discount kicks in ;)
I also wanted to be able to store the insulation board I use for cutting plywood in here
Our den area, right next to the garage door - a perfect place for plywood?
Rough design
The big challenge of fully enclosing a sheet of plywood in a pretty manner is that you need something bigger than a sheet of plywood to wrap around it.
Unfortunately, short of trying to source a custom-sized sheet of plywood, my only option was something like drywall. I wasn’t going to go down the drywall route, but even if I did, I still wanted to fully sheathe the box on the inside with plywood — this is so that the inside would be as smooth as reasonably possible: when sliding sheets into the box, I didn’t want to have it catch on anything on the inside.
I settled on a footprint of about 10” x 104” and worked backwards from there.
[Top down view] Figuring out the footprint for the plywood case
I settled on an internal-box with a footprint of roughly 8” x 98” — the length gives me a bit of wiggle room for plywood (nominally 96”) and the depth of roughly 8” (2” styrofoam + 5x sheets of 3/4” ply for storage + 1x sheet of 3/4” ply as the internal wall + wiggle room) let me fit everything I wanted to have
[Top down view] Figuring out how the box will come together
From the front-view, I wanted to use a double-thick base plate so that I could run slightly longer pocket-hole screws to attach the internal back-wall sheet to the baseplate without any risk of it punching through and damaging the floor. Having a double-thick base plate also means that the internal-height of the box is the same as the transition in/out of the garage. For the actual base-plate itself, I went with a fully-laminated full-length ply — I briefly considered a single strip with some ‘feet’ spaced apart (which had the advantage of allowing me to run something underneath/between the foot pads) but I went fully double-laminated because it was easier than trying to figure out where to land pocket holes.
[Side view] Envisioning how I would attach the box to the wall
Step 1: Attaching to the wall
First, I broke down my existing plywood cart to reuse the large plywood panel: the back-wall of the box doesn’t need to be super pretty after all.
I used glue and pocket holes to try and connect two 8-ft lengths of plywood together. As much as I was hoping this would ‘just work’, it was less annoying to add a ‘mending strip’ over the back side of the glue seam to stiffen it up. This 3/4 mending strip would also be a second point of contact along the wall, in addition to the wall-mounted strip.
While I was in a gluing mode, I double-laminated the base plate as well; there was a bit of unevenness between my stitched together panels so I hit it with the sander to even it out.
I mounted a single strip of 3/4 ply to the wall using just a couple of screws and slid the base plate in place. Now, placing the back-plate against the wall, I could verify that the back plate sat flush against the wall. Thankfully I only used a couple of screws because I had to trim the wall strip a bit. Once everything was in order, I could put together three of the sides of the box. I could then
Step 2: A pretty face
The wall wasn’t flat nor straight, so I waited until now before cutting the braces to the exact width at various points along the length of the box. I pulled the box off the wall so I could leverage my pocket-hole clamps a bit better and attached the top brace.
Once the braces were all in place, I needed to figure out the height I needed to cut at the different points — the floor wasn’t flat either! I have an area of roughly 52”x 104” which would need three panels of plywood no matter where I put the seams. I opted to have my seams running vertical because that would make trimming it out easier.
Since this area gets quite a bit of sunlight, I wanted to apply spar-urethane; I ended up applying seven coats, sanding in between with 400- and then 800-grit (no particular reason for that number, it just dried pretty quick so I was able to get a bunch of coats in)
I later found out that for #reasons (likely the angle between the back plate and bottom plate not being perfect 90), some of the braces were cut too short and for other reasons (likely a small amount of deflection), there was a front-to-back deflection of 1/16. The easiest solution was to just shim out the bottom, pushing the panel out.
For the last small strip of plywood, I opted just to make a couple braces to for the panel to sit against and made a cutout for a recessed power switch. I paired the switch with a rotating flush extension so everything would sit nicely. The entire front panel was face-screwed into the baseplate at the bottom and the braces at the top: theoretically, this could be taken apart if needed.
When making the cuts for the pretty-face, I made sure to keep track of which offcuts went where - I had briefly considered something like a waterfall edge to between the top (pretty-plate) and the front face. Since I ultimately went with using trim to cover everything up, this wasn’t as crucial. Like the front plywood face, the top plate was simply screwed down allowing this box to be disassembled if needed. For better or worse, I cut the top plate a bit wide and after securing it to the braces with at a couple points, used a router to cut it flush … inside the house. Even with my wife following along with a vac, it was a bit of a disaster but the top plate is now perfectly fitted!
Step 3: Door & trim
Building out the door plate was more of the same — stitching together some plywood to make the requisite size; I also cut out a relief for the floor-molding. Since my floor plate stuck out a bit more than I intended, I had to route out a relief on the back side of the door so that it would close flush.
I used a magnet recessed into the door plate paired with a couple of screws in the box to keep the door closed.
For the trim, I ripped down some leftover walnut I had into thinish strips, stabilized any cracks with epoxy and then planed it down to final thickness (somewhere around 3/16” thick). Using masking tape on the backside of the trim, I applied a bit of edge-glue as well (not that I expect the glue to hold over time). I applied a few coats of polyurethane (I was a bit pressed for time, so I used a pair of ceramic heaters to ‘encourage’ it to dry quicker).
I laid out the strips, keeping in mind that I wanted to be able to disassemble this box if needed. As such, to attach the trim, I used glue & pins in some places (generally where I had exposed plywood edges) and 3M VHB tape in other places (generally, face panels).
Trimming out the door, I added a thicker (roughly 3/8”) strip of trim — this would allow me to use the trim to overcome the magnet to open the door. I had to move slowly here since the different pieces of trim interact/overlap with each other. To account for the pseudo-swinging/sliding nature of the door, I cut a couple relief cuts as needed — work slowly and triple check everything!
A piece of walnut trim as a handle for levering the door off
Milestone
For a project that roughly amounts to ‘make a box’, this project was challenging because of the dimensions involved: part of me considered trying to find a way to get custom-sized plywood. For those that are more drywall inclined, I think using a thinner plywood (say, 3/8”) to sheathe the box (so that nothing catches) and then making the outside prettier with drywall might be a reasonable alternative.
Otherwise, the big challenge here is the fact that nothing is flat, plumb nor square — I guess I’m not surprised but it’s kind of crazy to see how much a small deflection of 1/8” can have a trickle-down effect. Major respect for people who do trim!
Working in the evenings and on the weekends, this took me two weeks to knock out so a definite shout-out to my wife for allowing me to make a mess of multiple areas of the house for that period.
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