A couple of years ago, just before I moved to California, I made a cabinet to store my CDs and DVDs. Ironically, I never took it with me.

I grew tired of my CDs and DVDs simply sitting a shelf, and appearing nothing but a big wall of media. I wanted something that could store the CDs behind a door, but not use those individual slots, since they can’t handle double CDs, and keeping CDs in order when new CDs are purchased is just too annoying. This meant I needed shelves, but I didn’t want huge shelves. I solved this problem by creating a series of bins, each of which can hold either 20 standard CD jewel cases, or 8 standard DVD cases. (8 DVD cases are almost exactly the width of a CD case.)

This cabinet has 24 bins, for a total capacity of either 480 CDs or 160 DVDs. The bins are wider than a standard CD jewel case, so that they can store the widest CD case in my collection, Johnny Cash’s Unearthed Box Set. (My other box sets have to sit on top due to their book-like formats.)

Below are the initial plans I made for the cabinet, along with photos of the final project.

I took the approach of patterning the cabinet after Japanese Shoji lanterns. I wanted very pale, but natural wood colored, panels with dark trim. I settled along something along these lines:

After much measuring, I came up with the following plans:

Back of Cabinet:

Doors:

Layout of Panels on a 4 ft x 8 ft Plywood Sheet:

For materials I chose a single 4 ft x 8 ft sheet of cabinet grade, unblemished, birch plywood. Trim is made from 1 inch square solid #1 pine. Hinges L-shaped brass piano hinges. The trim was stained with Minwax stain. I choose not to seal the work with polyurethane since it put a yellow cast to near-white birch.