As seen in the Fall 2009 "Special Kitchen Issue" of
Canadian Home Workshop
Magazine.
( Please see the issue for a detailed article.)
This is a design for a spice rack which features a tambour door on the front. It is meant to sit on your kitchen counter, with the door hiding it all away when not in use.
That door was the genesis of this project. I was trying to come up with a design for a spice rack to go along the back of our counter. However, I did not want a cluttered, dust-collecting, visually busy rack -- which is what you can get with most other racks. Then I came across a tambour door kit at Lee Valley Tools, and the idea was born.
This kit is designed for kitchen-counter appliance "garages", so the height is perfect. And with a bit of fiddling, I knew that I could use it to turn a simple spice rack into a classy "spice garage".
Some Design Notes:
- The sides are 1/2 Oak, as are the shelves
- The back is 1/4" plywood
- you'll want to fasten the spice garage to the wall to keep it still. Moving the tambour can otherwise cause it to slide around.
- The tambour does take up a fair bit of space at the top when it is rolled up, so you don't get quite as much space on the top shelf as you might think. Watch out!
- This is one project where you MUST prefinish the parts before assembly -- there is no way that you'll be able to finish the tambour properly once it is installed in the project.
- Note the notch in the bottom/back corner, which allows it to snugly fit over the backsplash on my counter.
This was another project where I found it very helpful, during the design process, to work with ideas in Sketchup. Not only did it help me with designing the actual project. But I could then go on the net and find some 'sample' kitchen designs in the Google 3d warehouse, and place my project right in a kitchen and see how it looked:
