This is the first of two similar “Free Little Art Galleries” that I built:
What I was striving for was to have the interior really feel like an art gallery:
So, there are some nice touches: clean white walls, cherry shelves, a varnished oak floor (some leftover white oak plywood leftover from another project), “skylights,” and even a little baseboard trim.
The recipe for building this little free gallery was as follows. First I built the plywood case – here it is with the rabbets in the walls ready for the ceiling to be inserted:
I’ve seen many these miniature outdoor houses fail because the interior walls are also the exterior walls, and eventually they get waterlogged (particularly those made of plywood), so it was important that the whole thing get wrapped in cedar – here’s an in-progress view of adding the solid cedar frame and tongue and groove paneling:
Building the roof with its “skylights” was interesting. I built another frame of solid cedar, akin to a cabinet door. I then routed out a rabbet around the two openings whose width matched the width of the acrylic panels. I slathered the grooves with a two-part epoxy and dropped the panels in, making sure the fit was tight and the surface was completely flush so that rain would just run off:
For the acrylic panel on the door, I used a more typical approach of simply adding a dado around the frame and embedding the panel:
A couple coats of spar polyurethane really makes the cedar come alive:
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