Designing and building a timber sideboard for turntable and vinyl record storage.
Role
Furniture designer & maker
Client
Myself
Completed
May 2021
Brief
In 2020-21 I undertook a Cert II in Furniture Making at Victoria University’s Trades Campus.
While the first few projects were relatively simple (chopping/charcuterie boards) or came pre-designed with detailed plans (a park bench), the final project was very much a ‘choose your own adventure’.
Designing without a brief or any real constraints felt like an almost impossible task–where do you even start?!–so I set some guidelines for myself. The project should:
- Be something functional that I actually needed in my home
- Allow me to practice new skills or techniques not used in previous projects
- Showcase some form of visible joinery
- Use hardwood (rather than veneered MDF) as much as possible
The plan
After going through a few rough ideas and sketches, I decided on a storage solution for my turntable and vinyl records. My collection had started to outgrow the classic IKEA Kallax 4×4 shelving unit I had been using, and sitting the turntable on top had meant that it collected a lot of dust and needed to have the ugly plastic cover over it when it wasn’t being used.
Once I had decided on the general direction, I moved in to Sketchup to test out the proportions and make sure it would fit into the space I had in mind for it at home.
The build process
The final product
