Well with Brandi away on placement still I decided to pick up a new hobby/trade. I figured it was time to start putting some of the things you see on HGTV into practice. So I designed and built my very own bookcase. Well it’s not really a bookcase as I never intended for it to hold books.
I built it basically to clean up some of the clutter surrounding the TV. Something to hold our small collection of DVD and Wii games, as well as the Karaoke machine.
I just took a few basic measurements and did up some math. Never before having really bought building materials myself, I made a series of educated guesses thanks to some advice from my father and the wonders of Google and YouTube.
I bought the materials Saturday but only had enough time on Saturday to outline the project and setup the pieces. I had the guy at the hardware store cut the pieces of 3/4” pine to the dimensions I wanted. Even though I hate to wait an hour for the guy to show up to operate the saw. I would have liked to cut it myself but faced the double problem of A) not being able to fit the uncut pieces in my car and more importantly B) not having a proper saw to cut it. In the end all the pieces were cut fairly well, with the exception of one piece which was cut slightly unevenly so that at one end it was the right dimension but at the other it had grown by a 1/4”. I later realized I should have looked more closely at the pieces I had chosen from the wood stack as some had filler in some of the knots that use to go right through.
Sunday I began in earnest to begin construction. I managed to pre-drill all the pilot holes in the side pieces and create the wider holes using the Fostner bit to hide the screws. Never having built shelves before I found the biggest problem was determining how to mark the holes evenly so the shelf would be level. I decided to clamp the 2 side boards together evenly and make the measurements on one board and then drilled the pilot holes right through and partially through the second board. Allowing me to line up the shelf height correctly.
The next biggest issue was attempting to level the shelves and drill pilot holes through the side of the shelve at the correct height. Fortunately the height of my 1st shelf happened to be the same as the width of the unit so I used the second shelf on it’s end as a guide. For the next shelf I had to cut 2 pieces of 2x4 however only owning a jigsaw they didn’t come out completely perfect which I later realized caused the shelf to be slightly unlevel in one direction. It was difficult to spot this with the level since the area I’m working in has an extremely uneven floor and there was a little bit of guessing and correcting the level to achieve the rest.
The next biggest hurdle came when I went to secure the back paneling which I used a cheap piece of plywood for. I made the unit so the shelves (but not the top) were a 1/4” shorter in depth then the sides. This allowed me to imbed the panel into the unit and not have the ugly edge of the plywood visible from the side or top. However when I went to secure the panel with 3/4” finishing nails I was able to secure it in 3 areas, the bottom and and each of the spots where the 2 shelves were. However I neglected an area at the top where I could tack the panel to since I had made the top the full depth of the unit to hide the edge of the panel. SO I had to compromise and I nailed 2 small 1”x1” squares of plywood panel in the top back corners.. not really noticeable except to me. The other drag though is that the guy who cut the panel didn’t do it very straight so it doesn’t perfectly fit and there is a tiny gap around the edges because it’s not square.
Anyways I had to hand sand the unit down with 80grit, then 150 grit and lightly with 220grit before applying some wood conditioning, followed by 3 coats of stain with lightl sanding in between and 2 coats of Polyurethane with light sanding of 220 in between and at the end.
the end product while not worth a million dollars is very strong and sturdy, functional and looks fairly well made. Not bad for my first foray into furniture building
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