Adding a hutch to a desk {post 1}

I promised plans today and here they are!  Hopefully I’ll be seeing how a sheet of plywood fits into a Honda Pilot today.  A Home Depot employee and I had a discussion on this matter several months ago, and he assured me that the old model Pilot fit a sheet with no troubles, while the newest version fits a sheet, but just barely.  We traded on our 12 year old van for a Pilot in July–the Honda salesman was a little bewildered by my interest in fitting lumber in the trunk   We bought the old model, so hopefully no worries.
I’ve kept the pictures at a large size so that you can click on them to enlarge and see the dimensions better.  I don’t know if that will work, but we’ll try it out.

Obviously this is not to scale.  As a general rule I like to use graph paper and get it somewhat to scale so I am not surprised by how the project ends up appearing.  Today I am walking on the wild side.

And here goes the disclaimer:  Use these plans at your own risk!!  I already modified some dimensions, that affected other dimensions, and although I think I did a good job going back and making the changes, I’m not guaranteeing that!!  From here on out I’ll be in the garage and lucky if I remember to take the pictures I need, much less jot down the corrections to the mistakes I’ll probably find.

I always feel better after saying all that, ha ha.  But the changes I made allowed me to utilize the entire sheet of 3/4″ plywood more effectively, just by shaving off 1/4″ of the width on the sides of the hutch (which also changed the width on the shelves).  I went and measured some of her books, and 10.25″ is plenty of width for even the biggest ones she has.  I am using up some various pieces of scrap ply I’ve got from other projects, for the sides of all 6 drawers–love using up scrap!  I would have preferred to use 1/2″ ply for the drawers, but I’d rather utilize the entire sheet, so 3/4″ it is.

There you’ve got it!  I’ll be trying out my brand-spanking new Kreg Rip Cut on this, as well as the Kreg shelf pin jig.  I got those back in June/July for my birthday, if you recall.  Sad that it has taken me this long to break them out of their packaging, but I can’t wait to use them now!