Last year for Mother’s Day, I had someone commission an art piece for his wife. She was delighted with it, and he was quite pleased with himself for having come up with an idea and successfully executed it. We were talking last week, and he wanted to really up his game for her this year, and the hook he came up with was coffee. She apparently has a shelf at work full of boxes of various and sundry coffee pods, so some sort of coffee pod organization seemed like a decent idea.
So, with the target in mind, he browsed around and found a bunch of different pod storage/display options. After doing all that homework, he handed the ideas over to me so I could throw together some design concepts. I whipped up some sketches, and he settled on the “chest” concept as the winner. (I was strongly leaning toward it, but I wasn’t going to prescribe anything.)
I’ll skip straight to the photos, and then throw in some description:
- She has at least a dozen different coffee pod varieties, so we went with a dozen drawers in a four high, three wide arrangement (which will fit on her coffee shelf quite nicely).
- Each drawer has space for 15 pods, as the pods are generally sold in dozen quantities. (If a drawer only held 12 pods, you couldn’t refill it without leftovers unless you completely cleared it first, which would be less than ideal.)
- Each of the three columns in a drawer has runners that hold the lip of the pods, holding them upright but also making it easy to tip them to grab one out of a full drawer.
- The runners stop with a 2mm slot at the front face of the drawer so you can drop a pod in with the label facing forward through a window in the front face, using the pods themselves as the drawer labels.
- The drawers sit on simple wood runners that are tacked and glued to the case walls.
- Given the limited space (and light drawers), the drawer pulls are a simple pair of 12.5mm (half-inch) buttons, tacked and glued to each drawer face.
I made the drawers with 5mm plywood, specifically RevolutionPly from Lowe’s. In case anyone wants to make some coffee pod drawers themselves, here’s my SVG cut file (made with a 0.14mm kerf setting).
I won’t bother you with the cut file for the case, as I made that with a selection of various 8.5mm and 10mm plywood scraps I had lying around. You can use boxes.py or whatever to make a case to fit your style and drawer count.
Anyway, it was a fun project to design and implement. I’ll have to see if I can beg a before and after of her coffee pod shelf, but I, for one, think it turned out great.
