A method and calculator for building foamcore drawer organisers

I do a lot of free-standing "holders" from industrial (5 ply) cardboard and hot glue. Surprisingly sturdy! Made a video about this too: https://youtu.be/s-aNW3h15K0 - all of these are still in use and I made more & more complex ones too.

Seems the calculator is designed for a "collection of boxes", which I guess is a start, but when I hear "organizer" a collection of separate boxes ain't what I want. The most significant factor of making one's own is that it's 105% customized to the need, no more no less. That means usually a lot of thought between "target place bounding box" vs "bounding boxes of things the holder shall hold".

For "organize a drawer, quickly!" I got myself a couple of sets of "modular" boxes - they have little tabs on their sides so one can snap them together like lego.

Foamcore is truly the world's best "around the house" material for quick projects. An amazing trick not used for simple boxes in the parent post, is to simply score the fold-lines of a box and then fold the foamcore into the shape you desire, instead of cutting all the edges. It makes for very fast and fun crafting.

My favorite activity I ever did with foamcore was to make a to-scale layout of an apartment my wife and I were moving into so that we could experiment with simple to-scale rectangles as stand-ins for furniture to figure out our layout.

What a wonderful material!

For finishing or to make them a little more stackable, grab a foam or mat bevel cutting tool, like https://www.amazon.com/Logan-Werks-Cutting-Straight-Bevel/dp.... There are tons of 3D-printable cutters out there as well.

Cut the same angle on the top inside and bottom outside and you can stack shallow foamcore bins in deeper drawers. Lots of other handy uses for an adjustable bevel cutter and foamcore boards.

Poor/clever man's Gridfinity

I feel like what got lost here was a pro/con evaluation.

Pro: Your drawers are neater now.

Con: You just spent maybe 100x of the time and effort you would have spent if you had just left your drawer messy, and had to search through it.

My back of the napkin math is that you go into an average drawer once a week, and mess makes it take five seconds longer to find something than in a clean drawer. Assuming you live 20 years before the drawer falls apart, you move, etc. that's roughly 20 * 50 * 5 = 5,000 seconds.

Now, read the article and tell me what multiple of 5,000 seconds the OP put into all that custom foam.

Foamed plastic seems underappreciated in the age of 3D printing. Recently I was researching foamed PVC sheets to make Raspberry Pi contraptions. Seems I'll have to buy them online, though.

I'm deep in the Gridfinity rabbit hole but this seems a good compromise since my 3d printer broke.

Cut the same angle on the top inside and bottom outside and you can stack shallow foamcore bins in deeper drawers. Lots of other handy uses for an adjustable bevel cutter and foamcore boards.

What a wonderful material!

For "organize a drawer, quickly!" I got myself a couple of sets of "modular" boxes - they have little tabs on their sides so one can snap them together like lego.

Your cardboard holders look cool, I'll give this a go. Thank you for sharing

I'm deep in the Gridfinity rabbit hole but this seems a good compromise since my 3d printer broke.

Poor/clever man's Gridfinity

Yup, as soon as you have a 3d printer, you’re going Gridfinity.

I feel like what got lost here was a pro/con evaluation.

Pro: Your drawers are neater now.

Con: You just spent maybe 100x of the time and effort you would have spent if you had just left your drawer messy, and had to search through it.

Now, read the article and tell me what multiple of 5,000 seconds the OP put into all that custom foam.

A lot of times, being organized and tidy is more about feeling good than it is about saving time.

If every time I open that drawer I'm a little frustrated, a little flustered, a little stressed, that's not just 5 seconds of "lost time" its a little bit of damage to my mood.

On the other hand, if every time I open the drawer it's all neat and organized and I can find the thing I'm looking for right away and I'm reminded of the good job I did building the organizers, that's a nice little micro-boost to my mood.

And maybe the time and effort spent figuring this out and building it and blogging about it was fun! Like a fun little hobby.

Everybody has a different temperament and different priorities, etc. Someone may look at this and think "what a waste of time". Personally, I kind of like projects like this that add a little extra satisfaction or polish to something I interact with freqently.

It’s not about overall time efficiency, it’s about satisfaction and quality of life.

Foamed plastic seems underappreciated in the age of 3D printing. Recently I was researching foamed PVC sheets to make Raspberry Pi contraptions. Seems I'll have to buy them online, though.

Check out foaming TPU filament first. Best of both worlds!

Your cardboard holders look cool, I'll give this a go. Thank you for sharing

Pro-tip I only realized later when making much bigger ones: it's worth to pay attention to the "grain", that is the orientation of the corrugations.

Find it hard to describe, but they should go "perpendicular to the axis of load". E.g. if you have an upright wall the top and bottom edge should show the "waves"; your base (and top) plate should have the "waves" showing on the left and right edges.

Took me some time to get used to thinking about it and it makes cutting out individual pieces (a lot) more involved, but the payoff is real for big units (big as in 50 x 30 x 40 cm; no longer can you move it one-handed!).

Yup, as soon as you have a 3d printer, you’re going Gridfinity.

A lot of times, being organized and tidy is more about feeling good than it is about saving time.

If every time I open that drawer I'm a little frustrated, a little flustered, a little stressed, that's not just 5 seconds of "lost time" its a little bit of damage to my mood.

And maybe the time and effort spent figuring this out and building it and blogging about it was fun! Like a fun little hobby.

It’s not about overall time efficiency, it’s about satisfaction and quality of life.

Check out foaming TPU filament first. Best of both worlds!

Pro-tip I only realized later when making much bigger ones: it's worth to pay attention to the "grain", that is the orientation of the corrugations.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a good set of drawers, must be in want of a good organization system.

Neat.

Last year, I bought a Bisley chest of drawers on wheels (it also doubles as a handy pull-out seat if you slap a cushion on top), and it’s been drawer chaos since then. Absolute mayhem; cables getting tangled with old keyrings, snacks sitting uncomfortably close to strong glue.

I hunted around for off-the-shelf drawer organisers, but didn’t really find anything that fit my needs. And then I stumbled across Foamcore.

🤘 #FOAMCORE 🤘

It sounds like a siiiiick music genre, but it unfortunately isn’t. It’s two sheets of paper with a layer of hard, dense foam between them. At my local crafts supplies store, it comes in 500 x 700mm sheets, in black and white. And it’s perfect for making boxes and organizers.

In addition to the board, you’ll need:

A sharp knife: a box cutter, pen knife, etc.
A hard edge: a ruler will work, but it’ll be much easier with a carpenter’s square because then you can brace against a known straight edge.
A cutting mat so that you don’t accidentally carve into your work surface.
Craft glue of some kind.
Small pins, for holding panels in place while the glue sets.

Once you’ve done that, the steps are:

Figure out all the shapes you’ll need (more on this soon)
Cut them out
Glue / pin them together. Start with the base and the two sides that have an edge that matches the base. This makes a little more sense if you look at the exploded view:

See how the left / right pieces are longer than their corresponding edges on the base?
They’ll go better if you attach the top / bottom pieces to the base first.
That’s it! In theory you can (should?) remove the pins after the glue’s set, but my pins came in a “lifetime supply”-sized box and are very small, so I just leave them in. They look kinda cool.

85 (width) x 128 (depth) x 45 (height).

Figuring out the shapes you need

If you’re impatient: I built a calculator. Go use it:

I’ve been building open boxes with a base, which is super helpful because you can lift the boxes clean out of the drawer with all of their contents.

To figure out the panel sizes: assume a box of width W, depth D, and height H. If your foamcore board has a thickness of 5mm, you need

two sides that are W x H
Two sides that are (D - 10mm) x H
One base, (W - 10mm) x (D - 10mm).

The tricky (fiddly, error-prone) part of the calculations is that the thickness affects the geometry.

The other tricky bit is figuring out how many sheets of foamcore board you’ll need – that’s why I built the calculator. If, however, you’ve got a surplus of foamcore and are trying to avoid using a computer while you’re crafting, a pretty good heuristic is:

Cut a bunch of strips that are as thick as your box height. If you’re making 80mm high boxes, cut strips 80mm thick.
Then you can cut all the wall panels directly out of those strips; the only thing you need to think about separately is the bases.

Also, warning: if you’re planning on completely filling a space (e.g. a drawer or a board game box), measure the inside carefully and then check the fit with an offcut. It’s super annoying when you’ve spent twenty minutes building a box and then discover that it’s a millimeter too big. 😐

Box variations

You don’t have to just make five-sided, open boxes!

Risers

You can add a riser for objects that you want to keep handy but would otherwise sit too low in the drawer to make them grabbable. This is just a 5-sided box, upside-down:

I debated whether I should even include this

Stackable

You can duplicate the base panel, shave a millimeter off the sides of your duplicate, and then glue the two bases together to make something that stacks and conveniently stays put when you wiggle it:

Stack ’em

Dividers

You can make a box with a divider, by adding an extra panel that’s (D - 10mm) x (H - 5mm):

Figuring out the pinning / gluing order is left as an exercise to the reader.
It’s pinned / glued on the underside, too.

Building a calculator

I built the calculator app because I made frequent mistakes while cutting things out. It was very helpful to plug box dimensions into the calculator, cut everything out, and then check that I’d cut all the right pieces:

Calculated result

Cut out panels. Feels good, man.

I built the calculator in about 3 hours using Claude Code. The experience was generally very impressive (way better than last time I tried vibe coding) and also mildly depressing. I’m still sorting through my thoughts on this, but stay tuned; I’ll write up something Soon™️.

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