One of my sons and his wife were just completing major renovations of their house when my son asked if I could build him a bookshelf. This was to be a freestanding bookshelf taking up a complete wall in his new study – 1.8m wide and 2.1m tall.
The first question was what do you want it made out of? To answer that we agreed that it needed a visit to Bunnings to look at the options. The only problem was that he was extremely busy with work and we took 2 months to even find time to do that. He ended up settling on 26mm thick beech for it’s light coloured grain that would match in with some other timber furniture in the house.
Next, I had to come up with a design. Being a bookshelf, it was fairly straightforward, but I needed to consider the shelf spacing to take into account the books he wanted to put on it now and into the future. Also, being 1.8m wide, there needed to be central support for each shelf and best position these.
Finally, there was the issue of how to install it. The size and weight of the bookshelf would mean that I couldn’t just construct it in my workshop and take it to his house in one piece. I decided to do all the construction in my workshop and dry fit it together to make sure everything was right, then deconstruct it and take it to his house. Once there we would have to put it together in his dining room and move it into the study from there.
Construction was relatively easy, with lots of sawdust created when I routed the timber for all the joins – I joked with my son that he had paid for some quite expensive sawdust. I also recessed the back panel so that it wouldn’t be obvious from the side. The base was configured to sit inside the skirting boards, enabling the back and side to go hard against the walls. Also provision was made to secure it to the wall as a safety precaution.
When we finally got it together, I discovered that it didn’t sit squarely against the side wall. Thinking at first that I had stuffed up, we checked the side nearest the door and found that it was perfectly square with the wall. Then we realized that it was the wall that was out of square – one of the drawbacks of an old house and something that the kitchen installers had also had to deal with.
This was also one project where I didn’t have to do the varnishing. I left it up to my son to do the final filling of nail holes, sanding and varnishing.
