Winter Wonderland Advent Calendar with Lockable Mini Gingerbread Houses

Now its time to cut the parts, they are laid out into multiple sheets in the design file named with the number of each you need to cut, each set of doors only needs to be cut once. I used the default xtool parameters for cutting and engraving the plywood.

To make the process more efficient, I assembled the 24 houses using an assembly-line approach. The first step was constructing the bases of the houses. This required attaching the back panel, bottom panel, and both side panels. It is important to ensure that the tab is on the right side when viewed from the front, with the exception on one of them which I made different for the last day. I used wood glue for all of the joints and allowed them to set before moving on to the next step.

The next thing that gets added is the two roof panels and the locking loop to the houses. These are the parts highlighted in yellow in the picture. Once this dries it is a great time to start decorating the roofs, with a variety fun patterns using white puffy paint and other paint/charms. I decorated some to look like shingles, others to be snowflakes

Now its time to add the doors, here is where the mini hinges come in. I used super glue to adhere them starting by attaching it to the house structure, followed by attaching it to the door. Super glue accelerating spray was super helpful to speed up this process and get good adhesion. The hinge goes on the opposite side of the locking loop.

This last step is just to tie everything together, I used popsicle sticks between houses as supports and hot glue to create a tree shape (structure below). I then added my mini combo locks that I had set to custom codes. To reveal the codes I gave my girlfriend a small envelope every day with a riddle in it that reveled the code. 

The tree was structured as follows (top to bottom).

1 house

3 houses

5 houses

7 houses

8 houses