Dutch Tool Chest – with drawers…

My tool chest made with the same basic design as the Dutch Tool Chest, but with drawers for storage on the bottom, rather than an open compartment. I made it sized to fit under a 54’ tall shelf, which is where it lives 98% of the time, so with the top closed it’s about 38” tall with the casters on the bottom.

The overall construction is roughly the same as the Dutch Tool Chest, just without the fall-front. It’s all made of dimensional pine (except the drawer sides, which are the little pine hobby boards sold at most home centers) of varying widths. This makes the whole chest relatively light and easy to move around.  I don’t move it around very often, but it is possible.

The sides are dovetailed to the base as in the original design.  Actually, these probably don’t make much structural sense in my design. Originally I think the bottom was dovetailed so the extra weight of all the tools in the bottom compartment wouldn’t pull the bottom board out. Since the smaller drawers on the bottom share their weight with the sides, the dovetails are probably not really needed. They do look nice, though!!  The middle shelf is dadoed in with some pegs added, more for looks than anything else. The top is breadboard-ed (can that be a verb?) with pegs and the back is all tongue and grooved, then pinned in place. There is a picture of the drawer detail, but they basically just slide in dados with a simple dovetail for the sides.  They are sized to fit the different tools housed in each.

The top section is used mainly for my relatively small collection of woodworking tools. These are obviously the tools that get used the most, so it’s handy to have them readily available (at basically waist height for me). Like most people I’m sure, all horizontal surfaces get cluttered with stuff, so the angled top is great for eliminating that problem! I also don’t have a big collection of large woodworking tools, so most everything fits up there, except for some little bits that get stuck into some of the drawers below (marking gauges, knives, etec.).

I know a lot of people don’t like drawers, but drawers and I get along just fine. These hold most of my random, non-woodworking specific, tools; pliers, wrenches, sockets, screwdrivers, hammers, etc. I don’t go into them nearly as often as the top, so no problems with access really.  The large, full width, drawer towards the top gets fairly heavy with the tools I have in it, but it’s really the only one that is tricky to open sometimes.  It’s a simple shellac finish, so I could throw some wax in the dados, but for the amount of time that I open it, it’s really not necessary.

It’s been in use now for a few months and has been great so far. I’ve added a couple of saw hangers on the sides and I’ll probably make some organizational changes for the top section eventually. Anyway, enjoy!