No admirals were harmed during the construction of this cabinet
Last week, I built a little shelf in the basement, and the pictures I took of the shelf showed a haphazard pile of drawers that were yanked out of the little kitchenette in the stupid room. After they sat there for a few days, I decided that it would be a good plan to go and actually build them into a new chest of drawers.
This is not one of my better projects. For one thing, starting a project by stacking the drawers on their side on a couple of strips of plywood, then nailing the slides in between them and using that side as a template for the other side can lead to hilarity when you screw up the measurements and end up with one opening being too narrow for the drawer (there are, as you can see, four drawers -- the only measurement which is the same for these drawers is their width; they are all slightly different lengths and not-so-slightly different heights. And then, after all this, if you fit the drawers in tightly when you're nailing the sides onto the bottom and top, they end up fitting rather tightly -- in this case, the top and the bottom drawers are very difficult to open. They might fit better when I wax the slides, but I doubt it because the, ahem, homemade splendor of the drawers ensures that the sides are not quite parallel and they bind when you close them all the way.
The irregular alignment of the drawer fronts is how they were made, and, fortunately, not my problem. The drawers, in case you're wondering, were made from 1/4th inch plywood (some of the fronts are 1/2 inch plywood, but others are two layers or 1/4th inch plywood nailed together. The cheerful red paint is a defensive measure so I can pretend that the drawers are not as, um, wonderful as they are.)
But they do fill a useful purpose; they allow me to store things like extension cords, soldering irons, and other tools that are too big to fit into the toolbox. And the hard-to-open drawers are, happily, very hard for small bears to open. And this chest of drawers also helps me recycle more of the stupid room and leftover odds and ends from pallets.
And it gives me a shining example of how not to build things. It's "pour encourager les autres" without having to actually kill anything.