This is a funny project to look back at because when I started it, my expectations were very low. All I wanted to make was a simple tray that I could leave in the kitchen but as the project evolved it became the beautiful toolbox you see before you! You might be wondering, how a simple tray turns into a toolbox and it’s actually not that long of a story. As I was working on it I realized that I had no use for a random kitchen tray, but I could use a way to store and organize my handtool!

What was very different about this project from a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing lately is I just went for it. I had a rough plan for the size of the tray but no idea of what details I would end up adding. After doing the dovetails, the tray looked a little flat so I figured I could add some stippling to help break up the flat surfaces. Then as the project progressed and I knew it was going to be a toolbox, I wanted to find a good way to hold my very expensive chisels. So, I quickly came up with the design for the two boxes, slapped them together, and ended up with something amazing!

I can’t stress this enough, this project went bizarrely smoothly and most of what went well on this project came from good luck rather than skill. The fact that all my tools fit the way they did or that nothing went catastrophically wrong left me kind of shocked, and that’s why this project, at least for a while, holds the number two spot in my top projects list.