Introduction: Table Organizer Inspired by Scandinavian Design

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About: I'm a maker by nature but not by profession. I do all sorts of creative stuff and I want to share these things with you. I will mainly be posting all sorts of crafts on instructables for now but maybe I'll do …

I can never seem to find my pens, erasers an other stuff when I need them. I decided to solve the problem by designing this scandinavian design inspired plywood table organizer. I love the striped look of thick blocks of plywood and I think It's very underused material.
The design is very minimalistic, the organizer fits well 3 pens (pencil, ballpoint and marker), phone vertically or horzontally, erasers and other small stuff and hard covered notebooks and even my sunglasses if needed.

PS. remember to check out the build video!

Step 1: Tools and Materials

This project is fairly simple. All the materials needed is a sheet of plywood, wood glue and some kind of finish if you decide to use one. I used 1.2cm sheet of plywood.

The tools I used for the build were a saw, orbital sander, powerdrill with a 1cm drill bit for wood and a sanding drum, a file, a sanding drum for dremel and some clamps.

Step 2: Preparing Strips of Plywood.

I had a ready right sized sheet of plywood for my project, it was about 30 cmx30 cmx1.2 cm. My sheet had this black epoxy coating on both sides of the sheet which I had to sand away. Simpler solution would obviously have been to use plywood that is not coated with anything. By useing 40 grit paper on my orbital sander it didn't take too long for me to get rid of the coating.

I wanted to end up with a 6 cm wide block of plywood so I cut the plywood into five 6 cm wide strips. Then I placed all the strips on top of each other to see how much I need to offset each sheet in order for me to get the angle I want to the ends of the block.

Step 3: Gluing the First Sheets

I guess I could have just glued all the sheets together and then used a router to make the holes I need, but I didn't. I decided to first glue together the two sheets that will be placed on top of the block. Before gluing the strips I had to make 2 wide holes to the top strip. Those I would use for my phone and a pocket sized notebook. I measured the holes so that my phone would sit there both vertically and horizontally in slight angle just in case I wanted to use it to watch some videos. The same holes fit also for my small notebook (and surprisingly for my sunglasses also).

I used a drill to get rid of most of the material and then I filed off the rest. Then I rounded the edges slightly with a dremel and a sanding drum.

Then I was ready to glue the two top sheets of plywood on top of each other. I made sure I didnt get any glue in the bottom of the holes because it wouldn't be easy to sand it off from there. The little glue I still maaged to get there I just swiped off with peace of paper as soon as I had clamped the thing down.

Step 4: The Second Gluing

After the first twwo sheets were glued I needed to add one more sheet of plywood to the block because I wanted to make a deeper hole than the two first ones for eraser and other small stuff.

I drew my design on the wood and did excatly the same thing that I did with the first holes except this time I used a power drill with bigger sanding drum to speed thing up with the filing. After I had my hole with rounded edges I glued the third and the fourth layer of plywood to the bottom of the block.

Step 5: Cutting the Slot and the Final Gluing

After the glue had dried I sawed the ends of my block to the rough angle I wanted. Then I sawed two slices off one end of the block. I kept the other slice and I threw the other one away. I could have just sawed one slice off the block and used a longer sheet of plywood for the base. At this point I sanded the sides of my pieces that would be pointing inside the slot on the block becasue that area would be hard to sand after the gluing. I then glued my pieces on top of the bottom layer of plywood. I noticed that it was VERY tricky to glue down such narrow skewed piece of wood.

Lastly I drilled some holes for my pens to the other end of the block and sanded down all the edges to their final shape. Then I put some oil on the thing to make it slightly darker and voalá.

Thank you for reading my tutorial and sorry for my broken english.