Junk in the Trunk

I was packing before our flight to my sister's house in Vegas, and couldn't shake the feeling that I should take my Kreg Jig. If my sister decided to randomly ask me to build something for her, I didn't want to be stuck without it.. But I didn't wanna take it if I didn't have to (visions of me mindlessly throwing the bit into my purse and then trying to get through airport security with it kept running through my head).

Here's the bit, if you haven't seen it. It's about 9" long and 5/8" wide.

Yeah... I could get that through security....

Without being tackled...

Or, more scary, having them take my bit from me....

Hmm.. I had to ask if she wanted me to build something. And the answer wasn't surprising. She did.

Pottery Barn's Emmett Trunk, to be exact.

So eleven hours before my flight was scheduled to leave, I started to sketch-up the plans for this trunk and sent them over to my sister for approval.

(do you see that price? Yeah, this trunk is sold for $599)

The only thing left to consider was the amount of distressing she wanted, but that could wait. I made sure to put the Kreg bit into my checked luggage, threw my shopping/cut list into my purse and made my way to my sister's house.

Our first day there was spent overbuying lumber at Lowe's (I totally screwed up the shopping list) and pre-cutting the boards. Since we didn't have a chop saw, or a way to quickly, accurately cut the boards to size, my idea was to cut and assemble planks and then cut the whole plank to size (so all the boards matched).

Since I had a bad experience with planking boards without staining before-hand (you can totally see the unstained parts between the boards), we stained the sides of all the pieces after cutting them, and then called it a night.

I kicked myself the next morning for not pre-drilling all of my pocket holes, but eventually I got them all drilled and the top and sides planked. Here's where I have to throw in a little giggle-worthy fact: At the start of the day, my step-dad declared, "We should have this all assembled in about 2 hours."

Uhh... If we do enough furniture together, he'll realize that it's not as quick as throwing up a house (how sad is that, btw?!).

Somewhere along the lines, we decided that we were going to steal some hardware off of my sister's entertainment center.... So some pieces had to be modified.

Sparks were flying, and it was COOL.

I'll totally over-simplify the process, and say that my step-dad "got 'em to work". There were a few trips to Lowe's, and a few Dremel bits bought between the above pictures... But all of the hardware works like a charm!

A quick coat of stain later (much more quickly than it would've been if we had to get between all the planks, at least), we thought we were almost done.

Until my sister pointed out that we hadn't done the trim yet.

Whoops. Simple fix.

(my New Year's resolution was to take less pictures with my cell phone for my blog - guess it'll take time)

So it got trim.

Some awesomely distressed trim, might I add....

I had major issues getting a decent picture of it before we had to leave (talk about deadlines), but this piece is just BEAUTIFUL.

And heavy.

And BIG!

(stow aways! FOUR of them fit!)

And you can build it! Plans HERE!