I’ve been cooking with fresh spices since the day I learned to fry an egg. Nothing beats fresh basil as a topping for pizza, or snipped fresh coriander to dash a warm bowl of curry. The downside though of fresh spices, is if you buy them packaged from the supermarket, it only takes a few days in the fridge for them to start looking like this:

So, it has been my dream for a while to build a small house for these guys to grow in that could fit in an NYC micro-size kitchen. I started out by sketching a few design ideas. I have a fetish for modular furniture, and this seemed like something that could potentially be stacked one on top of another. However, after speaking to Ben about this project, an idea come up to make half a green house, so that two halves would make the full greenhouse.

The materials I thought would be good to use were plywood and clear acrylic for the windows. Glass crossed my mind as well, but since I envisioned making holes on one of the side for the plants to breathe, I thought acrylic would be better. Here are the parts I planned for cutting on the CNC:

After planning these out, I went to get some wood and start cutting these parts out!

Once the wooden parts were cut, it was time to make the acrylic parts that would sit in flushed to the pockets created in the wooden frames.

Once all of the parts were prepared, it was time to assemble everything together! But before gluing the wooden frames together, I wanted to make sure the sides would be super-durable, so I drilled holes for wooden dowels on the sides. This was done by using a dowel jig, so that the hole for the dowel is created directly in the center of the plywood frame (and, the wood doesn’t split!)

Once those holes were drilled, the glue went on, the dowels went in and the clamps held everything together. After screwing on some last bits, my greenhouse was finally born!