Only Super Crafty People Will Attempt This Amazing DIY Mini Fridge

Are you tired of trudging all the way to the break room for a frosty-cold soda and perfectly chilled candy bar? (Are such luxuries unheard of in your office anyway?)

If you’re a skilled DIY type, you might try making your own mini fridge. Natural Nerd (of Patreon, Imgur and Reddit fame) did and now the rest of us feel like fools for putting up with room-temperature vending-machine snacks.

The fridge, which contains components both standard (refrigeration modules, power supply, wire terminals) and off-beat (doorknobs for legs, an aluminum handlebar on the lid), holds about five sodas and as many candy bars as you can cram in around them. As built, it also has an awesome logo and one innovation that most mini-fridges don’t have: a top-mounted door, making it easier to keep cold air in.

“As you can see, I’m not having it stand upright as most of the other mini fridges I’ve seen, and this is because I want to try to avoid letting the cool air flow out every time I open it,” Natural Nerd writes on Imgur. “With this design and the lid on top, most of the cool air will stay inside the fridge, and it won’t take long to cool it down again.”

It took Nerd about three or four days to complete the project, she says on Reddit, but “much of it was waiting for glue and paint to dry though, so not full days’ work.”

Natural Nerd posted the schematic and instructions on Imgur, for the intrepid (or anyone who just likes living vicariously through DIY masterminds). The full tutorial is available on YouTube.

While we at PayScale think that Natural Nerd’s desktop mini fridge is a pretty cool (see what we did there?) idea, we do not have the requisite technical prowess to comment on the safety of the product or its manufacturing steps. As such, this blog post should in no way be viewed as a recommendation to undertake this serious DIY endeavor.

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