Advent calendar Basic

How it goes together

The compartment rules, not the calendar. The measurement to think about first is not how wide the house is but what goes inside each compartment. That is why the control is “height of each compartment”, and the total height follows from it — multiply by the rows and add the shelves. The width is free, and it gets shared out between the columns.

Six by four gives the twenty-four. That is the usual grid, but it is not nailed down: four by six gives the same 24 in portrait, and 12 for half a month or 25 with Christmas Day are used too. If the count is not 24 the template says so and carries on.

Door or drawer, and they are not the same. A door is three pieces — the door, its pull and a hidden stop — and a drawer is five plus the pull, so the same calendar with doors uses less than half the wood. The drawer, in exchange, pulls right out and fills up comfortably.

The grid is half-lapped, like the dividers in a box. The shelves run side to side and the dividers floor to ceiling, and where they cross each one has a half-depth slot: the shelf at the back, the divider at the front. That is three shelves and five dividers instead of a divider for every compartment — eight pieces instead of twenty-three. With the outer walls they do lock in: the shelves pass through the sides with tabs, and the dividers through the top and the base. From the front you see the shelf edge running end to end.

The door swings on a square pivot, cut from the same sheet. That is the trick that gets you a real hinge without buying anything. The door has a tab one thickness wide at the top and the bottom, on the hinge side, and the shelf above and the shelf below have a round hole the size of that square’s diagonal. The square turns inside the circle, touching it at four points: a poor bearing, but a bearing. The door swings, stays captive and cannot get lost.

Square and not round, and there is a reason. A real round pin would have to be a cylinder perpendicular to the sheet, and a laser does not cut that: what it cuts is a flat tab. Turning on its axis, that tab sweeps a cylinder the diameter of its diagonal. Making it square makes that diagonal as small as it can be for the tab width, so the slop is the least possible: at 3 mm the hole comes out 4.24 and the door wanders two tenths.

The door sits a couple of millimetres in, on purpose. The pivot lives in the thickness of the door, and flush with the front its hole landed so close to the edge of the shelf that it broke through: it left a notch open to the front and the door came out. Set in by half a diagonal, the hole stays whole inside the wood. It also looks like an inset panel.

The doors go in last, which is why they have more room on top. Half-lapped, the grid goes together by sliding the pieces along the depth, and a shelf sliding in runs into the pivots, which stand upright. So the doors go in once the grid is built, from the bottom row up: lift the door, the top pivot goes into its hole and carries on into the compartment above — still empty — and the door is lowered onto the bottom one. Lifting it needs room on top: as much as the bottom pivot goes in, half a thickness, and a little more. At the bottom it rests on the shelf.

And it comes out the way it went in. The door ends up like the pivot doors on furniture: lift it and it comes off. Opening it does not, because you pull the pull sideways, not upwards. Keeping it captive would take something above the door, in that room on top, and that means a shorter door.

The stop is a straight strip that slots into the wall. A door on a centred pivot swings both ways, and one that opens inwards pushes the chocolate in instead of letting it out. The strip stands just behind the handle edge, with two tenons going into the wall on that side — the divider, or the side panel at the ends — and the door laps over it as it closes. When two neighbouring doors close against the same wall, their strips share the slot and each tenon reaches halfway.

The pivots reach halfway into the shelf. With every door opening the same way, the top pivot of one and the bottom pivot of the one above land in the same hole: each takes its half, and only one hole is cut.

The pull is a T fitted from inside, like the peg on the book box but the other way round. The stem comes out through a slot in the front with a rounded tip — that is what you grab, and a sharp MDF corner at a child’s hand height is a splinter — and the head, wider than the slot, stays on the inside: pulling to open, it bears against the front and will not come out. Fitted from the outside, the first tug would take it off in your hand. On a door it stands upright, on the side away from the pivot; on a drawer it lies flat, top centre. It goes in before the door, or before the drawer is closed up. The other grip is a cut-out hole to hook a finger into: 16 mm is comfortable, under 12 a finger will not go in.

The numbers go centred, or cut out separately. If the widest of them fits in the middle of the front without touching the grip, they all go centred; if not, they all move over to the free side, never some one way and some the other. Cut out, they come as loose pieces to glue on, which is what you do when the front is one colour and the numbers another. Two-digit numbers come in two bits: they go side by side.

The numbers can be shuffled. In order, 1 is top left and 24 is bottom right. Shuffled, they are spread around the house and you have to hunt for them. The spread is fixed, not random: the template redraws on every keystroke, and with numbers that jumped about the file you download would not be the one you saw.

The attic, open or closed. Open, the gable is a frame shaped like an upside-down V and the opening comes right down to the top of the body, so you see the whole scene; the scalloped trim is tongues of the frame hanging inwards, as on gingerbread houses. The frame is measured square to each slope, which is how it reads. At a roof height of 0 there is no roof and the calendar comes out square.

The back is a single piece, shaped like a house. It closes off the body and the attic in one go, like the back wall of the dollhouse, so the attic is always a closed niche for the scene and the string of lights. It is glued against the back edges of the grid.

The roof locks into the back and the gable. The sloping edges of both carry tabs that stand proud by one thickness, and each roof panel has its slots exactly where they land: it sits on and stays put, with no need to hold it while the glue sets. The tabs on both pieces are spaced the same way, so there is no way for one to end up out of line with the other. It needs eaves of at least one thickness so the slots do not fall on the edge of the roof panel; with less, the roof comes out plain and gets glued.

The assembly order. The grid first: the dividers standing on the base, and the shelves sliding in from the front between them until the slots meet. Then the body’s top over the dividers and the two sides, which the shelves pass through, and the back glued on behind. With all that built, the stop strips into their slots and the doors, from the bottom row to the top. Last, the gable standing at the front of the attic, and the two roof panels locked into it and into the back.

One click in the 3D viewer opens the door or drawer you touch, one at a time, and another click closes it. It is how you check the stop sits where it should.